Stalin told the anxious Mikoyan and Beria: “I told her neither one nor the other. She should marry Yury Zhdanov.” Simultaneously, this clumsy, tyrannical matchmaker told Yury to marry Svetlana.
On 16 July, Stalin embarked on a road trip to meet the people and see the country, something he had not done since 1933. It was to be a reflective and nostalgic three-month holiday, a mark of his exhaustion and his new style as a distant but paramount leader. He left the indecisive Bulganin in charge.2
While Abakumov tortured Jews to create a new “American” conspiracy and destroy Mikhoels, Stalin and his convoy of armoured ZiS 110s headed south, accompanied by Valechka, towards Kharkov.
51
A Lonely Old Man on Holiday
The Generalissimo ordered that there was to be no tedious ceremony and all passed off “without any sensationalism—which greatly pleased Stalin,” wrote Vlasik, who found the expedition exhausting. Stalin himself had only slept for about two hours but he was “in a good mood which made us all happy.” He inspected everything, muttering that he would not have seen anything “from my desk.”
He even experienced some aspects of ordinary life: his car broke down near Orel. Stalin got out for a stroll, surrounded by his “attachments,” and came upon some parked trucks whose drivers were struck dumb when he introduced himself. At Kursk, Stalin stayed the night in the flat of a local Chekist. In the morning, he thought they should leave the couple a present so he left a bottle of scent on the lady’s dressing table. At Kharkov, Stalin noticed people were still living in dugouts. He told Valechka that this upset him. When out-of-favour Khrushchev arrived, reassuring Stalin that the famine was much exaggerated and presented him with some juicy melons, Valechka was naïvely appalled, grumbling to Svetlana that they deceived “your father—of all people!”
Finally, the relieved Vlasik loaded Stalin onto the special train that took them down to Yalta where he probably stayed at the Livadia before the cruiser Molotov conveyed him to Sochi. The weather was gorgeous, the crew thrilled by their passenger. Vlasik, court photographer, took so many photographs that Stalin, “always sensitive,” noticed: “Vlasik’s doing well but no one photographs him. Someone must photograph him with us.”
In Sochi, Stalin strolled around the town, followed by Vlasik, Poskrebyshev and the frantic bodyguards who struggled to control the campers holidaying on the coast. When some schoolchildren gathered round his car, he offered them a ride to the local café, the Riviera, where a little girl cried because she had not got any sweets. Stalin put her on his knee and told her to choose anything she liked. Porcine Vlasik paid the bill, then turned to the children and cried: “Now children! A Pioneer Hurrah for Comrade Stalin”—the Soviet version of “Hip hip hurrah!” One can imagine him punching the air as “the children shouted a harmonious hurrah!”
They then drove down to Stalin’s spiritual home in these twilight years, Abkhazia, where he believed the air and the food ensured longevity: “Do you remember how amazed that English writer J. B. Priestley was when he met an Abkhazian peasant aged 150?” he reflected. “If I lived here, I might live to 150!”274
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
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
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 nic
knamed “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.
Vlasik and Poskrebyshev did not always dine with the Boss but the chef de cabinet invited guests with the drear words: “Stalin awaits you.”
When Poskrebyshev shepherded the guests to the door, Stalin joked: “So how’s our Commander-in-Chief?” Sunburnt, grey-haired, with a bald patch, thin-faced with a pot belly and sloping shoulders, Stalin met them on the veranda like an affable Georgian countryman, wearing a civilian suit like a safari costume. When it was very hot, there was a sprinkler on the Coldstream terrace that cooled the air, spraying an arch of water over the roof.
Sometimes, the housekeeper pointed the guests down the garden where they found Stalin wielding a spade, weeding his lemon trees assisted by General Vlasik: “I’m showing you how to work!” He showed off his lemons and roses: “he was a romantic about nature,” wrote Mgeladze.
But his favourite flower, the mimosa, was an organic metaphor for his own secretive sensitivity for when touched, it closed like a mouth. “The mimosa’s the earliest flower that anticipates the coming of spring,” Stalin told Mgeladze. “How Muscovites love mimosas, they stand in queues for them. Think how to grow more to make the Muscovites happy!” They often went for walks and sometimes even strolled through Sukhumi where Stalin asked schoolchildren questions like: “What do you want to do when you’re grown up?”
At the Georgian feast often laid up outside, Stalin genially opened the bottles. The “endless meals” were agonizing for the magnates but fascinating for the younger Georgians. Maps were brought in, empires admired, characters from the past discussed, jokes told, toasts raised.
Poskrebyshev toasted Stalin for destroying Bukharin and Rykov: “You were right, Comrade Stalin—if they’d won . . .” Poskrebyshev could afford a certain levity with Stalin who often appointed him “tamada.” “Now you’ll drink to my health!” Poskrebyshev ordered. Stalin obeyed.
Molotov hailed Stalin elaborately: “If you weren’t Stalin,” Iron Arse toasted, “the USSR would not have beaten Trotsky, won the war, gained the Bomb or conquered such an Empire for Socialism.” This pleased the host. The drinking often turned nasty when the Politburo or foreign vassals were guests but with the Georgians, it was much more cheerful and nostalgic.
When Stalin sang, Poskrebyshev and Vlasik provided the harmonies like a pair of grotesque choirboys. After dinner the guests usually stayed the night. Stalin could be unsettlingly kind: when Mikoyan’s brother Artyom, designer of the MiG (Mikoyan-Gurev) aircraft, suffered angina and was put to bed, he was aware of someone coming into his room and tenderly laying a blanket over him. He was amazed to see it was Stalin.
One thing united virtually all his guests: the desire to escape this strange nervy old man with his alternation of vicious, dangerous explosions, self-pitying regrets and excruciatingly boring reminiscences. Their frantic and creative efforts to find excuses to leave their all-powerful but super-sensitive host, without causing offence, provide a comical theme to these long nights. 1
That year, Svetlana was one of the first guests, staying for three weeks in her own smaller house. She found the awkward dinners with Beria and Malenkov tedious. Escape was easier for her but nonetheless a struggle: once at dinner with Molotov, Mikoyan and Charkviani, she suddenly asked: “Let me go back to Moscow!”
“Why’re you in such a hurry?” replied her hurt father. “Stay ten days. Is it boring here?”
“Father, it’s urgent! Please let me go!”
Stalin became angry: “Stop going on about it! You’ll stay!” Then later, Svetlana started again.
“Go if you want!” barked Stalin. “I can’t make you stay!” He could not grasp the extent to which his political murders had sterilized and poisoned his world but perhaps he sensed it when he pathetically told Svetlana: “You aren’t in a stranger’s house.” Svetlana was still there when Zhdanov arrived. She managed to depart on good terms, sending “Father” a warm letter to which he replied: “Hello Svetka . . . It’s good you haven’t forgotten your father. I’m well . . . I’m not lonely. I’m sending you some little presents— tangerines. A kiss.”
Zhdanov came to help work out Stalin’s policy for securing his hold over Eastern Europe. Molotov’s tendency to negotiate with the West had ended with the rejection of the Marshall Plan. Now Zhdanov seemed to gain ascendancy in foreign as well as domestic policy, or rather he was naturally closer to his master’s voice. Their relationship remained almost paternal. Stalin marked Zhdanov’s speeches with schoolmasterly notes: “Must put in Lenin quotations!” he scrawled in brown crayon on one.
Together they created Zhdanov’s speech that divided Europe into “two camps,” the ideological basis for the Iron Curtain over the next forty years. To counteract the Marshall Plan and the discomforting independence of Tito’s Yugoslavia, Stalin ordered Zhdanov to create a new Communist International, the Cominform, to enforce Soviet hegemony over Eastern Europe.
Zhdanov, accompanied by his hated rival Malenkov, recently recalled to a lower post, then flew up to the Polish town of Szklarska Poreba where the ruling Communist Parties from Poland to Yugoslavia awaited Moscow’s instructions. The conference took place in a secret police convalescent home, with Zhdanov and the rest of the delegates staying upstairs. Apart from giving his “two camps” speech on 25 September, Zhdanov behaved with all the blustering arrogance of an imperial viceroy. When Berman, one of the Polish leaders (the one who had waltzed with Molotov), expressed doubts about his Cominform, Zhdanov arrogantly replied, “Don’t start throwing your weight around. In Moscow we know better how to apply Marxism-Leninism.”
At every stage, “Comrade Filipov,” or Stalin on holiday, instructed “Sergeev and Borisov” (Zhdanov and Malenkov) on how to proceed. This was the high point of Zhdanov’s career and his greatest lasting achievement, if it can be called that. It was appropriate that the meeting was held in a sanatorium because, by the end of it, “the Pianist” was collapsing from alcoholism and heart failure. He may have triumphed over Molotov, Malenkov and Beria but he could not control his own strength. Zhdanov, only fifty-one but exhausted, knew “he wasn’t strong enough to bear the responsibility of succeeding Stalin. He never wanted power,” asserts his son. He flew back to the seaside to recover near Stalin, where the two called on each other, but then he suffered a heart attack.277
Zhdanov’s illness created a vacuum that was keenly filled by Malenkov and Beria who became so close, they even sent their greetings to Stalin jointly that November, writing “we derive great happiness from working under your rule . . . Devoted to you, L. Beria and G. Malenkov.” Yet their friendship was always political: Beria really thought Malenkov “spineless . . . nothing but a billy goat!” Nonetheless, Zhdanov noticed their resurgence, telling his son: “A faction has been formed.” Resting until December, he was too weak to fight this vicious battle.2
Once Molotov and Mikoyan, fresh from their recent humiliations, had also been to stay, Stalin found himself alone. He longed for the company of young people. Beria, according to his son, thought that Stalin’s loneliness was an act. He wanted his associates around him “to keep an eye on them, not from fear of solitude,” but this does not explain his yearning for the companionship of unimportant youngste
rs. “While everyone talks about the great man, genius in everything,” Stalin muttered to Golovanov, “I have no one to drink a glass of tea with.”
Zhdanov, on one of his visits, was accompanied by his son Yury, Stalin’s ideal son-in-law. Stalin often telephoned him to give career advice: “People say you spend lots of time on political activities,” he had once told Yury, “but I want to tell you politics is a dirty business—we need chemists!” Yury qualified as a chemist then took a master’s degree in philosophy.
Now twenty-eight, Yury and one of his aunts were driving along by the Black Sea and as they passed the road to the Gagra dacha, they were surprised to see a number of guards running towards them: “Comrade Stalin summons you, Comrade Zhdanov!” they said.
Yury sent a message that he was with his aunt and the guard ran back: “Both invited.” On the enclosed veranda, a suntanned, relaxed Stalin awaited them. After asking about his father’s health, Stalin, pouring the wine, came to the point: “Maybe you should work for the Party.”
“Comrade Stalin,” replied Yury, “you once told me politics was a dirty business.”
“This is a different era. Times change. You’ll do Party work, you’ll travel and see the regions. You’ll see how we make decisions and how they disagree with them immediately.”
“I’d better consult my mother and father,” said Yury Zhdanov who knew that no magnate wanted his children in the snakepit of Stalin’s court. But Zhdanov agreed: Stalin appointed Yury to the important job—for such a young man—of Head of the CC Science Department. Unwittingly, Yury was placing his head inside the jaws of the crocodile at the very moment that the battle for succession was about to burst into blood-letting. “I didn’t fear him,” says Yury now, “I knew him since childhood. Only later I realized that I should have been afraid.”