Stalin

THE SEATS OF STALIN’S POWER

The early morning hours of 1 March 1953 at the near dacha. The “Five’s” last supper.

On Saturday, 28 February 1953, Josef Stalin invited four of his senior associates to the Kremlin: Georgy Malenkov, Lavrenty Beria, Nikita Khrushchev, and Nikolai Bulganin.¹ During the final six months of his life, Stalin and these four men constituted what was known as the “ruling group” or simply the “Five.” They met regularly in Stalin’s home. The leader’s other old friends—Vyacheslav Molotov, Anastas Mikoyan, and Kliment Voroshilov—were in disgrace, and he did not wish to see them.² Assembling a small group of supporters to act as his right hand in ruling the country was a key element of Stalin’s modus operandi. He liked to name these groups according to the number of members: the Five (Piaterka), the Six (Shesterka), the Seven (Semerka), the Eight (Vos’merka), the Nine (Deviatka). These informal groups enjoyed supreme authority while formal party and state structures functioned as regular bureaucracies handling the day-today running of the country. Dividing government into formal and informal institutions allowed the dictator to exploit the capabilities of a vast, all-encompassing bureaucratic machine while keeping a firm hold on the true levers of power. Stalin often changed the composition of the ruling group. He maintained daily, hands-on control over this central node of power, keeping its members at his constant beck and call for meetings and “friendly” gatherings. The dictator’s approach to exercising power through a combination of bureaucratic institutions and patrimonial power inspired Yoram Gorlizki to coin the phrase “neopatrimonial state.”³

Fear was the primary force behind the dictator’s patrimonial power over his top associates and other highly placed officials. With the Soviet state security system under his firm control, Stalin could arrest anyone at any moment and have the person summarily shot. He did so countless times. The entire patrimonial political enterprise rested on terror.

The most important decisions were always made through direct—ideally face-to-face—communication with the dictator. This was the fastest and most effective way for an official to achieve personal and administrative objectives. But communication required access to the seats of power, places that for countless Soviet officials and members of the top leadership took on an almost sacred aura. Some were more sacred than others. There was an unspoken hierarchy in the various settings from which Stalin wielded power, and admission to some endowed greater status than others. Stalin spent a significant portion of his life in these seats of power. Each reflected some aspect of his personality and dictatorship.

The primary and most official seat of power was Stalin’s Kremlin office. This commodious, oak-paneled study was divided into two zones: Stalin’s desk and a long conference table. Other furnishings included a grandfather clock (which Stalin used to monitor the promptness with which those summoned arrived) and a plaster death mask of Lenin encased in glass and displayed on a special stand. On the walls hung portraits of Lenin and Marx. During the war, they were joined by the tsarist-era military heroes Aleksandr Suvorov and Mikhail Kutuzov. Otherwise the decor hardly changed over the many years he spent there. During the war, the bomb shelter built beneath the Kremlin contained a slightly smaller but otherwise almost exact replica of this office: the same furniture, the same pictures, the same curtains (despite the lack of windows).⁴

Over thirty years, approximately three thousand different people visited the Kremlin office.⁵ Stalin’s closest associates, of course, were there frequently, but the visitors also included heads of government ministries and enterprises, academics, cultural figures, senior state security and military personnel, and foreign guests. The Kremlin office was the most accessible of the seats of Stalin’s power.

On the evening of 28 February 1953, Bulganin, Beria, Malenkov, and Khrushchev, who had been called to the Kremlin by Stalin, did not linger in this office. Stalin immediately took them to the Kremlin movie theater, a much more exclusive place. The theater was a 7.5-by-17-meter space with twenty seats, installed in 1934 where Russia’s tsars had once enjoyed a winter garden. Before it was built, Soviet leaders watched movies either outside the Kremlin, in the building of the cinematography directorate, or in a small Kremlin room that had been used for silent films.⁶ Stalin enjoyed watching movies with his comrades, and these viewing sessions gradually became obligatory. Thanks to detailed records kept by Boris Shumiatsky, who oversaw the Soviet film industry, we know quite a bit about how these evenings in the movie theater were spent during 1934–1936.⁷ Shumiatsky would bring the movies and listen to the comments of Stalin and his colleagues, as well as the decisions that were sometimes taken during a viewing. His notes provide a valuable window onto the rules of behavior within Stalin’s inner circle and the atmosphere of these gatherings.

As a rule, the viewing sessions began late in the evening and extended into the early hours of the morning. Stalin sat in the front row, surrounded by members of the top leadership. There was always a great deal of discussion about the movies and newsreels, both while a film was rolling and afterward. Stalin always had the first word. He would issue instructions concerning the content of specific films, the Soviet film industry, and ideology in general. In the movie theater, he made on-the-spot decisions on everything from budgetary issues to the publication of policy-setting articles in the Soviet press to personnel matters. Filmmakers would occasionally be invited to viewings of their films. Such an invitation was a great honor. Stalin would congratulate them on their work and offer “guidance” on improving it. Shumiatsky’s records make it clear that these get-togethers in the Kremlin movie theater were not merely relaxation for the Soviet leadership. They were informal meetings of the top level of government at which questions of ideology and cultural policy were decided. Most likely, Stalin and his colleagues also discussed other affairs of state before and after the viewings.

Shumiatsky’s records end abruptly in early 1937. This was undoubtedly tied to the intensification of repression in the country. Shumiatsky himself was arrested in early 1938 and shot soon after. Stalin’s movie viewing continued, but we know almost nothing about later sessions. It appears that toward the end of his life, only his closest associates were admitted to the Kremlin movie theater. The 28 February meeting of the Five was Stalin’s last movie-theater get-together.

When the movie was over, Stalin, as he often did, invited the others to dine with him at his dacha near the Moscow suburb of Volynskoe. The dacha was just a few minutes away, earning it the nickname of “the near [dacha]” (blizhniaia). Occasionally the seat of power would shift to one or another of the houses or dachas around Moscow or in the south, where Stalin spent lengthy annual vacations. But the “near” dacha held a special place in his heart. It was an important epicenter of his life and rule.

The first house on the site of the near dacha was built in 1933. The move there was associated with upheavals in Stalin’s personal and political life. The terrible famine that swept the land in the early 1930s as a result of Stalin’s policies coincided with family tragedy. In November 1932 his wife, Nadezhda Allilueva, died by her own hand.⁸ Stalin started a new life in a new place.

Stalin personally oversaw the near dacha’s many expansions and renovations. The huge house that resulted was an odd blend of the institutional and the pretentious.⁹ All the rooms resembled one another and were, in the words of Stalin’s daughter Svetlana, “impersonal.”¹⁰ The second floor, for which an elevator had been installed, was rarely used. Stalin’s favorite room toward the end of his life was the so-called “small dining room” on the first floor. This roomy space contained a rectangular table three meters long, a couch, a cupboard, an easy chair, a small telephone table, and a fireplace. A pair of binoculars, hanging from a hook, and a hunting rifle were kept next to the fireplace. A large carpet covered the floor. The room led to a glassed-in veranda and a terrace. According to Svetlana, Stalin both slept and worked in this room. The large table was always piled with papers and books. Unless he had company, he ate at one of the table’s corners. He kept his medicines in the cupboard. Stalin enjoyed sitting by the fire, where he would sometimes order shashlik to be roasted. He liked to receive his visitors here. It is also where he suffered the stroke that ended his life.

The dacha was surrounded by a fifty-acre park. Stalin personally oversaw the landscaping and farming that took place on the grounds. He designed a greenhouse for citrus plants, supervised the installation of a vineyard, grew his own watermelons, and kept a pond stocked with fish. He sometimes had a portion of his watermelon crop sent to Moscow stores. There were also horses, cows, chickens, ducks, and a small apiary. His bodyguards testified that Stalin devoted a great deal of time to the running of this agricultural enterprise and kept track of even the smallest details. Hundreds of orders from Stalin to the man in charge of running the estate, Lieutenant Colonel P. V. Lozgachev, have been preserved:

7 April 1950: a) Start planting watermelons and melons in raised beds on 10 May; b) In mid-July, trim the watermelon and melon vines.…

20 April: … Line the path from the kitchen to the pond with fir trees.… Plant corn every half meter next to the main house and between apple trees by the pond, toward the gazebo. Plant beans there too.… Plant eggplant, corn, and tomatoes along the edge of the garden.

Lozgachev reported that he received such instructions almost every day.¹¹ In essence, Stalin was the master of a small estate that he preferred to run himself, not leaving important details in the hands of subordinates. The patriarchal way in which he ran his dacha estate is consistent with his approach to running his much larger “estate,” the Soviet Union. He kept track of state resources and reserves and took charge of their allocation, jotting down important pieces of information in a special notebook.¹² He immersed himself in the details of film scripts, architectural plans, and the design of military hardware. His interest in landscaping extended beyond his personal domain to the streets of Moscow: “People say that the square on the Arbat … has not yet been covered with paving blocks (or asphalt). This is shameful! … Put pressure on them and make them finish up the square.”¹³

One result of Stalin’s desire to shape the spaces around him was the creation of a room that served as the dacha’s social nexus: a 155-square-meter hall. The room’s centerpiece was a 7-meter-long table that stood on a 6-by-12-meter rug. (The area of this rug, incidentally, equaled the average living space of sixteen Soviet city dwellers in 1953: 4.5 square meters per person.) Easy chairs and couches lined the walls. Occasionally Stalin worked at the table in this large room or on the couch or easy chairs. For the most part, however, the room was reserved for meetings and festive gatherings.

A number of participants in these gatherings, which were held regularly, have left descriptions. The food was simply placed on the table, and guests helped themselves to whatever they wanted and took their plates to any free seat. Dinner stretched for many hours, ending long after midnight or even at daybreak. These meals were an opportunity to discuss and decide various matters of state. But that was not all. For Stalin, they were a way of keeping an eye on his associates and gleaning information. As one of the few forms of entertainment available to him, they also filled an important social need: they eased his sense of isolation. As Khrushchev wrote, “He felt so alone he didn’t know what to do with himself.”¹⁴

Plenty of drinking went on around this table. As he aged, Stalin moderated his own consumption of spirits, but he liked to spur others to overdo it and then watch their behavior. He had several ways of forcing his guests to drink more heavily than they might have wished. Toasts were proposed in rapid succession, and failing to empty one’s glass was unacceptable. “If someone didn’t participate when a toast was made, he was ‘fined’ by having to drink another glassful and perhaps several glasses.”¹⁵ The Yugoslav politician and writer Milovan Djilas later recalled a drinking game he witnessed at Stalin’s dacha during a visit in January 1948: “Everyone guessed how many degrees below zero it was outside and then, as a penalty, downed … a glass for each degree he was off.… I remember that Beria missed by three and claimed that he had done so on purpose to get more vodka.”¹⁶

The alcohol loosened inhibitions. “The atmosphere at these dinners was unconstrained, and jokes, many of them obscene, evoked raucous laughter.”¹⁷ In addition, there were other, more “cultured” amusements. Sometimes they sang revolutionary and folk songs in which, the wife of Andrei Zhdanov recalled, Stalin would join with a quiet tenor.¹⁸ Zhdanov entertained his comrades with lewd ditties.¹⁹ “Such songs could be sung only at Stalin’s. You couldn’t possibly repeat them anywhere,” Khrushchev recalled.²⁰ For a while a piano stood in the large room. Some remembered Zhdanov playing it, although there is no clear record of what he played or how well. After Zhdanov’s death in 1948, Stalin ordered the piano moved to an adjacent room. More often, music was provided by a radiogram (a combination radio and phonograph), on which Stalin played records, both Russian folk songs and classical music. Sometimes he enjoyed listening to his impressive collection of some 2,700 albums, on his own or with guests. Occasionally there was dancing. According to Khrushchev, Mikoyan was considered the best dancer. Everyone did the best he could. Even Stalin “would move his feet around and stretch out his arms.”²¹

There probably was no dancing during those early hours of 1 March. This was a quiet get-together, limited to Stalin’s most trusted associates. “We would go to Stalin’s place quite often, almost every evening,” Khrushchev recalled of that period. These dinner gatherings with the aging and unbalanced Stalin were not easy on his guests. In Khrushchev’s words, “We were supposed to work at our jobs and the posts to which we had been elected and, besides that, attend Stalin’s dinners like some sort of characters in a play and entertain him. That was a difficult and painful time for us.”²² But Stalin’s comrades were not about to complain, and they assiduously fulfilled their dinner duties as a condition of their inclusion in the ruling circle. As usual, the gathering adjourned toward morning (Khrushchev places its conclusion around five or six a.m.). They parted on a good note. As Khrushchev described it, “Stalin was a bit tipsy and seemed very well disposed toward everyone.” He led his guests into the vestibule, “joked a lot, waved his hands around, and as I recall he poked me in the stomach with his finger and called me Mikita. When he was in a good mood, he always used the Ukrainian form of my name—Mikita.… We too were in a good mood when we left because nothing unpleasant had happened at the dinner, and not all these dinners ended that well.”²³ We have no reason to doubt Khrushchev’s account. Dmitri Volkogonov claimed that Stalin was irritable and threatened his guests, but he does not cite any specific sources.²⁴

Stalin was equally capable of rewarding his underlings with his amiability and menacing them with threats. For almost two decades he used both the carrot and the stick (in Russian, the knout and the ginger cookie, with a good deal more of the former) to keep not only his close associates in hand, but also the many millions who lived in the USSR and, later, the entire “socialist camp.”

Over his seventy-four-year life, the Soviet dictator fought through a stormy historical landscape to become an important factor in events not only in Russia, but also the world. Among scholars, there is more agreement than controversy on the historical and ideational antecedents that shaped him, including traditional Russian authoritarianism and imperialism, European revolutionary traditions, and Leninist Bolshevism.²⁵ These influences, of course, do not diminish his major personal contribution to the formation of a uniquely Soviet totalitarian system and ideology. Ideological doctrines and prejudices were often decisive in Stalin’s life and actions, but instead of receiving them passively, he adapted them to the interests of his own dictatorship and emerging superpower. His personality also played no small role in the political course he forged. He was cruel by temperament and devoid of compassion. Of all the available methods for resolving political, social, and economic conflict, he favored terror and saw no reason to moderate its use. Like other dictators, he was stubborn and inflexible. Concession and compromise were seen as a threat to the inviolability of his power. He made limited and half-hearted reforms only when socioeconomic crises were reaching the breaking point and the stability of the system was imperiled. His theoretical dogmatism lay at the root of the violence that defined his regime.

Underpinning Stalin’s worldview was an extreme anti-capitalism. His hostility toward this system was unequivocal, and he rejected even the limited concessions that Lenin made in instituting the New Economic Policy (NEP). Stalin grudgingly allowed a few capitalist economic vehicles within the Soviet system, such as money, limited market relations, and personal property. After millions had died during the famine of 1932–1933, he agreed to allow peasants limited freedom to produce and sell outside the collective and state farm system. But to the end he believed that the concessions that had been forced on him by hard circumstances would soon be reversed and the socialist economy would be transformed into a money-free powerhouse where people would work as ordered by the state and receive in exchange the natural goods that the state decided they needed.

In Stalin’s worldview, the state the Bolsheviks created was an absolute. All existence was completely and unconditionally subordinate to the state, and its highest personification was the party and its leader. Personal interests were recognized only to the extent that they served the state, which had the unquestioned right to demand from people any sacrifice, including their lives. The state was unrestricted in its actions and could never be wrong, as it represented the ultimate truth of historical progress. Any action by the regime could be justified by the greatness of its mission. Mistakes and crimes by the state did not exist; there was only historical necessity and inevitability or, in some cases, the growing pains of building a new society.

The primary tool used to compel submission to the state and suppress the individual and the social was the so-called “class war” against foreign and domestic “enemies.” In this war, Stalin was the foremost theoretician and a ruthless tactician. With the successful advance of socialism, he asserted, the class war would only intensify. This idea was a cornerstone of his dictatorship. As a means of interpreting reality, the class war theory was also a powerful propaganda tool. Inadequate political and economic outcomes, the hardships endured by the populace, and military failures could all be explained by the underhanded scheming of “enemies.” As a method of state repression, class war gave the Terror the breadth and brutality of an actual war. The Soviet dictator has earned the distinction of being the organizer and director of one of the most powerful and merciless terror machines known to history.

Stalin had no trouble reconciling Marxist and Bolshevik-Leninist dogma with great-power imperialism. In November 1937, he told his associates the following: “The Russian tsars did many bad things. They plundered and enslaved the people. They waged wars and grabbed territory in the interests of the landowners. But they did do one good thing—they created a huge state that stretches all the way to Kamchatka. We have inherited that state. And for the first time we, the Bolsheviks, have brought together and consolidated this state as a single, indivisible state … for the benefit of the workers.”²⁶ These candid words are all the more telling as they were spoken at a dinner celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the October Revolution, the country’s main revolutionary holiday. In the international arena, Stalin’s expansion of the empire makes him a worthy heir to the Russian tsars. Only the ideological façade was different. At the Berlin train station on the eve of the Potsdam Conference in 1945, U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union Averell Harriman asked Stalin how it felt to arrive in the capital of a defeated enemy as a victor. Stalin replied, “Tsar Alexander made it all the way to Paris.”²⁷ Yet Stalin arguably outdid the tsars. The Soviet empire expanded its sphere of influence to encompass huge swaths of Europe and Asia and transformed itself into one of the world’s two superpowers.

Did Stalin look back on his triumphs after parting with his guests for the last time in his life on 28 February? Did his thoughts take him to earlier times—his childhood, youth, the revolution? Like the lives of his fellow revolutionaries, Stalin’s life was cleanly divided into two parts: before and after the revolution. Conceptually and chronologically, these two periods were approximate halves of his life. The first thirty-eight of his seventy-four years were lived before the revolution, and twenty of them were spent actively working toward it.