Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar

  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, tri
ed 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.”