Stalin

THE FUNERAL

The Vozhd, the System, and the People

For three days beginning on 6 March 1953, the Soviet Union said its ceremonial farewells to Joseph Stalin. His coffin was put on display in the very center of Moscow, in the House of Unions’ Hall of Columns, the traditional site for public mourning of Soviet leaders that had earlier served as the House of Receptions for Moscow’s nobility. At four o’clock on the afternoon of the sixth, the public was let in to pay its final respects. The viewing of the body was poorly organized, and the provisions made for the crush of people who headed toward the House of Unions were not conducive to public safety. Those trying to get one last look at the dictator streamed into narrow streets filled with police and trucks meant to serve as barriers. In the chaos and panic many suffered disabling injuries or were crushed to death. The files of investigations into these events have yet to be made accessible to historians. In remarks made to a small gathering in 1962, Khrushchev said that 109 people in the crowd died that day.¹

No information about this addition to the long series of Soviet tragedies appeared in newspapers, which were filled with grandiloquent expressions of sorrow and grief for the late vozhd. People’s true feelings came out in a flood of letters, as eyewitnesses to the tragedy registered their complaints with various government offices:

This is not the first time that during the movement of a large crowd the police were transformed into a helpless organization, or rather into violators of order. How distressing it was when—in front of a crowd of hundreds and foreigners darting about with their cameras—they began to retrieve the injured and crushed and send them off in ambulances. A simply shocking scene.²

For five hours people were herded all over Moscow, and none of the police knew where the line was! The police were running into columns made up of many thousands of people, with their cars causing casualties, cries, and groans. Hundreds of thousands of people were walking around the blocked-off streets leading to the Hall of Columns and could not find the way in! … Only a wrecker could announce that access would begin at four but announce the route at nine.³

In many ways these letters captured the essence of the Stalin era, both in their lexicon—with references to foreigners “darting about with their cameras” and “wreckers”—and in the events they describe: the police turning into violators of public order. Relying on brute force, the dictatorship had attained its goals at the expense of countless victims. The boundary between rational order and destructive chaos was blurred. Those charged with maintaining order wound up wreaking havoc.

Perhaps the tragedy in Moscow forced Stalin’s heirs to ponder the police state’s shortcomings, but for now they had no option but to rely on the institutions and methods bequeathed to them. Stalin’s funeral, set for 9 March, was prepared much as the viewing in state had been, but possibly with a bit more care. The top priority was security, ensured by 22,600 secret police agents, policemen, and soldiers. Thirty-five hundred vehicles were commissioned to block streets.⁴ The government approved a minute-by-minute schedule of funeral events: the carrying of the coffin from the House of Unions, its placement in front of the Lenin Mausoleum in Red Square, a mourning gathering for the public, the carrying of the coffin into the mausoleum. Several hours before the ceremony, six thousand soldiers and fifteen thousand members of a “delegation of workers” were brought to Red Square.⁵ This time everything went according to plan.

Although incompetent officials bear much responsibility for the casualties in Moscow, another cause of the tragedy was the sheer number of people wanting to catch one last glimpse of the vozhd. What drove them? Was it love, curiosity, mass psychosis, or a rare opportunity for a spontaneous display of emotion? Apparently all these elements were present, along with many others. The few available documents that shed light on the public mood reveal a complex range of responses to the vozhd’s illness and death. On 5 March 1953, State Security Minister Ignatiev presented the Soviet leadership with a report on soldiers’ reactions to the news that Stalin was ill. The document described a certain pattern in the reaction of the “faithful.” One common thread was sympathy toward Stalin the man, who, according to Soviet propaganda, was the embodiment of goodness and benevolence: “My family takes this news as a terrible sorrow befalling our country”; “He worked very hard, and that took a toll on his health.” “Positive” responses often involved expressions of concern over the future of the country and the responder’s own future. Two points long emphasized by Soviet propaganda played a part in such positive responses: Stalin was irreplaceable and war was looming: “It’s kind of scary. Who will take his place after his death?”; “Maybe this will speed up the onset of a Third World War.” The chekists also reported on “negative” and “hostile” statements: “Serves him right”; “That’s just fine”; “Stalin won’t hang on for long, and that’s even better. You’ll see that everything will immediately change.”⁶ All such letters led to arrests or at least an investigation.

March 1953 saw a surge in arrests and convictions of people charged with “anti-Soviet agitation” for expressing satisfaction with Stalin’s death or otherwise denigrating him. A forty-four-year-old Muscovite named S. M. Telenkov, who worked at a scientific institute, drunkenly proclaimed in a commuter train, “What a fine day it is today; today we buried Stalin. There’ll be one less scoundrel around and now we can get back to living.” R. S. Rybalko, a twenty-eight-year-old working-class woman from Rostov Oblast, was convicted of using profanity in regard to Stalin. Ya. I. Peit, who had been forcibly resettled in Kazakhstan, was sentenced for destroying and stomping on a portrait of Stalin after an official mourning ceremony. Upon hearing of Stalin’s death, P. K. Karpets, a thirty-two-year-old railroad worker from the Ukrainian city of Rovno, swore and exclaimed, “Smell that? The corpse is already stinking.” Ye. G. Gridneva, a forty-eight-year-old female railroad worker from Transcaucasia, was not able to contain herself and commented to a coworker, “A dog dies a dog’s death. It’s good that he died. There won’t be any kolkhozes and life will be a little easier.”⁷

The expressions of anti-Stalin sentiment that came to secret police attention were just the tip of the iceberg. Most people had been trained to keep their opinions to themselves. The ubiquity of informants and the habit of fear kept free expression to a minimum, to say nothing of more demonstrative forms of protest. The choice was simple: either accept—or pretend to accept—official values or find yourself in a camp or face to face with an executioner. This circumstance diminishes the value of such normally candid sources as diaries. One must assume that even in the privacy of their own homes, Soviet citizens exercised self-censorship and used their diaries more as potential alibis than vehicles for frankness. Newspaper reports on mass demonstrations, summaries prepared by state security on the public mood, and letters written to the authorities by ordinary citizens provide only part of the picture. Furthermore, many of these documents are still hidden in closed archives. Historians attempting to fathom the public mood during the Stalin era still face major obstacles.

The 190 million people living in Stalin’s Soviet Union on the eve of his death constituted an exceptionally complex community that bore little resemblance to the “New Man” featured on the covers of Soviet magazines.⁸ Many factors worked to give cohesion to Soviet society and promote support for the regime, and the motives for this support could vary from sincere enthusiasm to reconciliation with the inevitable to ordinary submission in the face of overwhelming power. The huge scale of violence and terror made fear and compulsion the backbone of the Stalinist system, albeit hidden behind a façade of enthusiasm. At the same time, loyalty and belief in the system and the man were not always feigned. The perpetual fear that was the primary instrument for unifying the people and suppressing independent thought was used alongside “positive” mechanisms of social manipulation. Both the carrot and the stick were applied to keep Soviet society moving in the desired direction.

One by-product of the regime’s policies was the creation of a large privileged class of officials. Those holding all but the most junior government or party posts enjoyed many benefits, including high social status and significant material perquisites. After the mass purges of the second half of the 1930s, the ranks of the Soviet nomenklatura stabilized. Repression against officials during the postwar period was more the exception than the rule. Furthermore, there is evidence that on the eve of Stalin’s death, officials and their relatives were essentially immune from prosecution. The requirement that any arrest or prosecution of a party member be approved by the leadership of party committees led to a bifurcation of the judicial system. In many cases members of the nomenklatura and their relatives avoided prosecution for administrative or criminal offenses that would bring severe punishment to an ordinary citizen.⁹

Another category—“the country’s best people”—approached the status of officials within the huge party-state apparat. These “best people” could be found in every social segment and professional group, including workers, peasants, writers, artists, and scientists. The best known examples were the so-called Stakhanovites, real or imagined shock workers at the forefront of production who were held up for admiration as “beacons” of the Soviet spirit. Enjoying a stature somewhere between ordinary citizens and officials, the Stakhanovites quickly assimilated the latter’s value system, although in theory they kept working away as before. They served as spokespeople, lobbying for the interests of enterprises and regions and enjoying significant material privileges. A typical representative of this category of beneficiary of the Stalinist system was the eponymous miner Aleksei Stakhanov, who earned celebrity and Stalin’s favor through his record-breaking productivity. He quickly developed a taste for the nomenklatura lifestyle and bombarded Stalin with requests:

Joseph Vissarionovich! Give me a nice car and I will justify your trust. Soon the Stakhanovite movement will be ten years old, and I’m going to Donbas and will again show people how to work. I keep asking and they keep giving me some broken down war trophy clunker, but if just once I got something nice, I’d stop asking.… Also, about the apartment.… I can’t get anywhere with my requests to fix it up. The walls are dirty, the furniture is frayed and broken …, while other people get their walls papered with silk twice a month and get all sorts of furniture. This isn’t correct, so I’m asking for a renovation and new furniture so I won’t be ashamed to invite people to my apartment.¹⁰

Another consequence of the channeling of benefits to the upper crust of Soviet society was the policy of disproportionately allotting resources to cities, especially major ones. Forced industrialization and militarization widened the gulf in living standards and social status between the rural majority and urban minority.¹¹ Many urbanites, especially in the capitals and major industrial centers, belonged to a relatively privileged and well-remunerated class. During years of famine they may have been hungry, but since they received a government ration, they were not dying of starvation like the peasantry. They had internal passports, unlike the peasants, and relative freedom of movement. Urban populations also enjoyed better health care and a well-developed cultural and educational infrastructure. In the stores of Moscow and Leningrad, where most food and consumer goods were sent, shoppers could find what they needed and even had a degree of choice.¹² The relative accessibility of educational institutions and high-paying jobs gave urbanites much better economic prospects. The monetary reform, which reduced prices in state stores while increasing taxes on peasant production, disproportionately favored the residents of capitals and industrial centers. These measures forced peasants to sell the products of their private plots at lower prices in urban markets. The consequences of these policies apparently escaped Stalin’s awareness. Mikoyan, whose duties placed him in charge of certain commercial matters, offers the following account:

I told him [Stalin] that we could not lower the prices on meat and butter, on white bread, first of all because they were in short supply and second because it would affect the procurement prices, which would have a negative effect on the production of these products, and when these goods are in short supply and with this reduction in prices there would be huge lines, which would lead to profiteering; after all, workers cannot go to the store during the day, so the profiteers would buy up all the goods.… But Stalin insisted, saying that this was necessary in the interests of the intelligentsia.¹³

Mikoyan here nicely sums up the predictable effect of the politically motivated price reduction: shortages, lines, and a shadow market. But these were of little concern to Stalin. His focus was on the regime’s bulwark, the privileged segment of society in major cities. The government’s preferential distribution of resources made even the average urbanite many times better off than the rural population. One symptom of this inequality was the number of young rural women streaming into cities to work as housekeepers for urban families for no more than bread and shelter. Clearly, the urban minority and the rural majority had starkly divergent perceptions of reality. It was the urbanite viewpoint that found voice in memoirs and diaries and has disproportionately influenced contemporary understandings of day-to-day life under Stalin.

Another factor that led Soviet society to tolerate and even support the dictatorship was war. Memories of the horrors of the world and civil wars, the victory over the Nazis (paid for with 27 million lives), and the fear of a third world war all had a huge impact on perceptions—and not only in the Soviet Union. Stalin enjoyed the image of a savior who had delivered the world from a terrible evil. For decades afterward, the 1945 victory lent legitimacy to the Stalinist regime and those of his successors.¹⁴

The list of historical circumstances that enabled the Stalinist system to endure could be continued, but even in conjunction with an ever-vigilant apparatus of repression they could not completely hide the contradictions inherent in Soviet society or suppress widespread dissatisfaction. From the moment they came to power as a radical revolutionary party, the Bolsheviks relied on a strategy of dividing society and suppressing the fraction that, for reasons of class origin or societal role, was considered hostile to socialism. This strategy included killing off the members of the hostile groups.¹⁵ The Stalinist revolution devoted tremendous resources to purging society of these “elements.” Furthermore, along with the nobility, bourgeoisie, tsarist officers and officials, and anyone else proclaimed persona non grata after 1917, the largest segment of the population was stigmatized: the peasantry. During collectivization, many peasants were branded kulaks and shot, exiled, or driven out of their native villages. Millions of people from every sector were persecuted on a variety of pretexts and put into the camp system or simply killed. Aware that these measures had earned the dictatorship true enemies, Stalin intensified his preemptive purges, most notably during the Great Terror of 1937–1938. Repression begat repression. By the end of his rule a significant proportion, if not the majority, of Soviet citizens had at one time or another been arrested, imprisoned in a camp, forcibly relocated, or subjected to some softer form of mistreatment.

The regime’s victims did not necessarily turn into conscious opponents. Terror often had the opposite effect. Intimidation made people more governable and submissive and forced them to demonstrate their loyalty. But it would be wrong to assume that submission was the only possible reaction. The historical record attests to the existence of widespread anti-government feelings or even active forms of resistance. For understandable reasons resistance was most common when the dictatorship was first being consolidated—most notably peasant revolts during collectivization in 1930 and its aftermath.¹⁶ The Terror and the stabilization of the system sharply curtailed opportunities for overt action, especially on a large scale. But it is important to note that access to secret police archives, which would reflect the true state of affairs in the late Stalin era, is extremely limited. We may learn that our image of the 1940s generation as silent and submissive is misinformed.

A root cause of widespread dissatisfaction was the Soviet Union’s low standard of living.¹⁷ Agriculture, its productivity severely undermined by collectivization, lurched between crisis and stagnation. Almost every year, the Stalinist government acknowledged that famine or “food difficulties” affected either a large swath of the country, as in 1931–1933 and 1946–1947, or some particular regions. Even in the best years the average diet was meager. Most people lived primarily on grains and potatoes. Budgetary studies conducted on the eve of Stalin’s death, during the relatively prosperous year 1952, established the following daily nutritional intake in worker and peasant families: the average Soviet citizen consumed approximately 500 grams of flour products (primarily bread), a small amount of cereals, 400–600 grams of potato, and approximately 200–400 grams of milk or milk products. These items accounted for the bulk of the typical diet. Anything else, especially meat, was a special occasion. The figure for per capita consumption of meat and meat products averaged 40–70 grams per day and 15–20 grams of fat (animal or plant oils, margarine, or fatback). A few teaspoons of sugar and a bit of fish completed the picture. Average citizens could permit themselves an average of one egg every six days. These rations are approximately equal to the dietary norm for prison camps.¹⁸ The figures were produced by the Central Statistical Directorate, which was under constant political pressure and probably painted an overly rosy picture. Averages could be inflated, for example, by selecting workers at the high end of the pay spectrum or peasants from relatively prosperous kolkhozes in the study. Also, the budgetary studies did not factor in the often poor quality of the food. A resident of Chernigov Oblast wrote to Stalin in November 1952, “Now they are baking black bread, and even that is of poor quality. It is impossible to eat such bread, especially for people in poor health.”¹⁹

The supply of manufactured goods was just as bad. Prices of factory-made items were traditionally kept exceptionally high. People had to settle for simple, relatively cheap products, but few could afford even these. For example, in 1952 only one out of every four peasants could afford leather footwear.²⁰ Some lacked even the simplest footwear and clothing. As one resident of a village in Tambov Oblast wrote to Stalin in December 1952, “In our kolkhoz the kolkhozniks have one article of winter clothing for 3–4 family members, and children in 60 percent of the population cannot go to school since they don’t have the clothing.”²¹

For the majority of the population the housing situation was no better. Under Stalin, housing was the chronically underfunded stepchild that received whatever resources were left after priority items had been taken care of. For years the housing shortage grew continually worse—and then came the devastation of war. As of the beginning of 1953 there was an average of 4.5 square meters of residential housing per urban resident.²² When temporary residents and those without official registration were taken into account, this ratio grew even worse. The quality of housing was also low. Only 46 percent of state-owned residential space came equipped with running water, 41 percent with sewage hookups, 26 percent with central heating, 3 percent with hot water, and 13 percent with a bathtub.²³ Even these figures reflected the higher standards found in major cities, chiefly the two capitals. A striking indicator of the housing crisis was the prevalence of urban “barracks”—flimsy temporary communal housing without plumbing—and the increasing number of people registering such barracks as their residences. In 1945 approximately 2.8 million people lived in urban barracks, but by 1952 the number had grown to 3.8 million. More than 337,000 people in Moscow lived in barracks.²⁴

Another source of hardship for the Soviet people was the exceptionally difficult working conditions in industry and agriculture. The poorly developed system of material incentives led to widespread coercion in the workplace. The use of slave labor was of course most blatant within the Gulag system, but supposedly free industrial and agricultural workers also often toiled under compulsion. The workforce for certain industries, especially the most poorly paid and dangerous, was assembled by pressing young people into service through compulsory mobilization. Evasion was punishable by a term in a labor camp. Beginning in 1940, emergency labor laws were used to bind workers to their places of employment. Peasants, who were essentially not paid for their work in kolkhozes, were prosecuted for failure to fulfill their work quotas. Between 1940 and 1952 approximately 17 million people were convicted of tardiness, leaving their place of employment without permission, or evading mobilization.²⁵ This huge number, which fails to capture the extent of violations of workplace discipline, belies the propagandists’ exultation of Soviet workers’ selfless enthusiasm.

Between the two extremes of devotion and opposition to the regime, the vast majority made empty shows of loyalty but were largely indifferent to politics. Only marginally influenced by propaganda and trying their best to evade the grip of repression, most took comfort in tradition and ritual. Despite state repression of priests and active church members, especially in the 1930s, most Soviet citizens held onto their faith. During the census of January 1937, 57 percent of respondents over the age of sixteen identified themselves as religious—more than 55 million people. Surely many others hid their faith out of fear of persecution.²⁶

In the area of inter-ethnic relations, Stalin left a problematic legacy. The relative liberalism of the early Bolshevik regime, which built what historian Terry Martin calls an “affirmative action empire,” came to an end in the early 1930s.²⁷ Under Stalin, nationalities policy grew increasingly brutal. Mass arrests and executions based on nationality, the internal exile of entire peoples, and the effort to use russification to create a single Soviet nationality laid a minefield under the country’s future.²⁸ Explosions started to go off while Stalin was still alive, when guerrilla wars roiled western Ukraine and the Baltic states. Although a degree of inter-ethnic unity was actually achieved, behind the propaganda façade extolling the “friendship of peoples” seethed many inter-ethnic conflicts.²⁹ The “Russian question” that grew out of the contradictory position of the Russian majority—simultaneously the bulwark of the Soviet empire and one of its chief victims—promoted instability and ultimately destroyed the Soviet Union, an interpretation advanced by Geoffrey Hosking.³⁰

What did Stalin know about the real life of “his” people? The Albanian Communist leader Enver Hoxha visited Moscow in 1947 and later recalled Stalin saying, “To govern, you have to know the masses, and in order to know them, you have to walk among them.”³¹ Stalin could hardly claim to adhere to his own wisdom. After his famous visit to Siberia in 1928, most of which was spent meeting with functionaries, he almost never walked “among the masses.” Official meetings with representatives of the workers were carefully orchestrated propaganda spectacles. During better days, Stalin would occasionally indulge his taste for theatrics and suddenly appear in public. But even these spontaneous meetings inevitably took on the aura of “Christ appearing to the people.” In September 1935, accompanied by several Soviet leaders, he toured the outskirts of Sochi and encountered small groups of vacationers. On Stalin’s initiative a spontaneous “fraternization” was allowed. One vacationer left a striking account of the event:

Comrade Stalin … stopped us with the following words: “Why are you leaving comrades? Why are you so proud that you shun our company? Come here. Where are you from?” We walked up to him.… “Well, let’s get acquainted,” Comrade Stalin said, and he introduced us to each of his companions in turn and introduced himself as well. “This is Comrade Kalinin, this is the wife of Comrade Molotov … and this is I, Stalin,” he said, shaking everyone’s hand. “Now we’ll all have our pictures taken together,” and Comrade Stalin invited us to stand next to him.… While the photographers were working, Comrade Stalin kept making fun of them: he said they were “mortal enemies” and were always trying to interfere with one another. He asked that they photograph not only him but “all the people.” … Then Comrade Stalin began to invite the woman selling apples from a kiosk … and a salesman from the food stand to come have their pictures taken. It took a long time before the disconcerted saleswoman could be persuaded to leave her store. Comrade Stalin told her that “it’s not good to be so proud” and told the photographers not to take the picture until she came. “The saleswoman,” Stalin proclaimed, “should become the most respected woman in our country.” Finally she came and the photo shoot continued. An empty bus drove up, and Comrade Stalin invited the driver and conductor to have their pictures taken.³²

Obviously such “walks among the people” did little to enhance Stalin’s understanding of them, and even these mostly stopped after the 1930s. The vozhd never took an interest in seeing the conditions in which the Soviet people were living, what they bought and where, what sort of health care or education they received. His knowledge of “the masses” came mostly from what he read in his office. So far we know of two main sources from which he gleaned knowledge of daily life: summary reports from state security about the public mood and letters and complaints from ordinary citizens. A steady stream of such letters arrived in government offices, including some addressed to him personally.

As far as can be determined from archival studies, state security summaries were a major source of information for the Soviet leadership in the 1920s and 1930s. These reports contained rather candid assessments of the situation in the country, albeit from a chekist perspective, which saw almost all crises and difficulties as the work of enemies. There were a number of types of reports, some providing an overview of sociopolitical processes, others devoted to matters of economics or politics. One problematic aspect of these reports was their length. The leaders for whom they were prepared had to spend hours poring over them. In recent years historians have published a number of informational state security summaries dating to the prewar period.³³ These publications, however, are based on copies found in state security archives—not in Stalin’s personal archive. We do not currently know the extent to which, or in what form, they are contained in the Politburo archive, which is part of the Archive of the President of the Russian Federation. Historians therefore cannot be sure to what extent the leadership in general or Stalin in particular read these secret police summaries. There is evidence to suggest that they were mostly unaware of these reports’ contents.

We know more about Stalin’s familiarity with letters from Soviet citizens. It would not be an exaggeration to say that most of the country sent complaints, requests, and petitions on a wide array of topics to all sorts of government offices. Such letter writing was an extremely common practice and was even encouraged by the authorities. Within the highly centralized system, letters to the government were one of the few ways of solving everyday problems. The government was virtually the only employer. It also had authority over the allocation or construction of housing. Government stores supplied (or were supposed to supply) all basic needs. Government hospitals were the only places to obtain treatment for serious illnesses. The government determined the rather narrow category of people eligible for pensions or benefits and the size of the payments. Given the flaws of the Soviet judicial system, citizens turned to bureaucrats to resolve conflicts and disputes. Abuses by officials within the huge bureaucratic apparat occasioned countless grievances. Arrests, forcible relocations, imprisonments in camps, or death sentences against tens of millions of people generated millions of complaints and pleas for relief. Arrestees themselves wrote, as did their relatives, and even unrelated people sometimes worked up the courage to intercede on behalf of an acquaintance or colleague. This pursuit of justice was encouraged by the state since it created the illusion of impartial leadership.

Another practice that was encouraged was denouncing abuses or “enemy activity.” Stalin made it no secret that he held denouncers and informers in high regard. All denunciations, including anonymous ones, were investigated. The government’s attitude is eloquently illustrated by the fact that even prisoners who were deprived of all other rights had the right to submit denunciations. In February 1936 the NKVD chief signed an order calling for the installation of boxes in all camps, prisons, and penal colonies into which inmates could insert statements addressed to him personally or the head of the Gulag directorate. “The boxes shall be sealed with the seal of the Directorate of Camps,” the order read, “and only the head of the camp or his deputy (in camps) and the head of the Department of Detention Centers or his deputy (in prisons and penal colonies) shall open them.” All correspondence was to be sent to the NKVD chief personally and “under no circumstance concealed.” Inmates were to be informed of “the purpose of these boxes.”³⁴

Taking advantage of the regime’s eagerness to uncover enemies and the almost total impunity enjoyed by slanderers, many Soviet citizens used denunciations to game the system. Informers used the government to attain their own mercenary objectives—to settle scores, get rid of annoying neighbors sharing the same communal apartment, or eliminate those competing for the same job. For the hapless multitudes at the bottom of the societal hierarchy, denunciations were the only means of taking revenge against powerful officials. The state implicitly encouraged people to use this disgraceful means of fighting for their rights.

In addition to complaints and denunciations, the archives abound with “helpful” letters. Some offered ideas for reorganizing government agencies or for various socioeconomic innovations; some offered ideas for renaming cities or creating new holidays or ceremonies; others sought to correct “errors” in the press. Writing such letters was one of the few outlets for activism available to ordinary citizens. These letters may have contained an element of self-promotion as their authors tried to draw the top leadership’s attention to themselves.

As the supreme authority, Stalin, of course, was all these correspondents’ prime addressee. It is hard to know the precise number of letters addressed to him personally, but it apparently exceeded several hundred thousand per year.³⁵ Obviously not all of them reached his desk; he was shown a selected sample. The nature of this sample is of interest from a number of perspectives. Primarily, it shows how well informed Stalin was about people’s lives and tells us what he expressed an interest in seeing. No doubt the apparat was given criteria for selecting the letters he would be shown.

Handling letters addressed to Stalin was a complicated bureaucratic process. Within the Central Committee’s Special Sector, which served as Stalin’s personal secretariat, was a division dedicated to processing his mail. After the war this division was called the Special Sector’s “Fifth Section.” In early 1950 it had a staff of twenty.³⁶ They received and logged letters addressed to Stalin and immediately forwarded a significant portion of them to various agencies for review. The heads of the Special Sector, especially Stalin’s personal assistant, Aleksandr Poskrebyshev, were shown the most important and interesting letters.³⁷ Poskrebyshev further filtered them, leaving just a few of the most interesting for his boss. As a result of this tiered system, Stalin saw just a tiny percentage of the hundreds of thousands of letters sent to him, and over time this number shrank. In early 1946 Stalin saw about ten letters per month, but by 1952 he was shown just one or two.³⁸

This small sample revealed little about real life in the Soviet Union. Most of the letters reaching Stalin’s desk belonged to one of three categories: queries on matters of theory, letters from old acquaintances, and a large number of letters of support. On extremely rare occasions he might be shown correspondence that tiptoed around some unsavory aspect of Soviet reality. Overall, the letters he saw reflected the vozhd’s growing desire to live in the past or savor hopes for the future. Pressing matters of real consequence likely to provoke negative emotions were avoided.

As ignorant of the life of the people as the vozhd was, the people knew even less what kind of a man he was. Partly due to his personality and partly out of calculation, Stalin, unlike many other dictators, rarely spoke before large audiences. He preferred to express himself in writing. The aggressive propaganda of Stalin’s articles, interviews, and theoretical works created the impression that the invisible vozhd was ever-present and all-knowing. His cryptic sententiousness gave him a certain charisma.

Tight control over the alchemy of official “Staliniana” has created false and doubly majestic images of Stalin and his accomplishments.³⁹ These images outlive the man himself and have an appeal even in contemporary Russia. The collapse of the Soviet Union, the stresses of the transitional period, corruption, poverty, and glaring social inequality all feed the longing for a social utopia. A significant portion of Russian society seeks recipes for the present by looking to the Stalinist past. Popular images of the greatness of the Stalinist empire—of equality and the fight against corruption, of the joy and purity of this distant life undone by “enemies”—are exploited by unscrupulous commentators and politicians. How great is the danger that a blend of historical ignorance, bitterness, and social discontent will provide fertile ground for pro-Stalinist lies and distortions to take root?

Could it really be that Russia in the twenty-first century is in danger of repeating the mistakes of the twentieth?