Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  Beria said the only way to survive was “always to strike first.” It was sensible to denounce your fellow bosses at all times or, as Vyshinsky put it, “keep people on edge.” When Molotov made a mistake, Vyshinsky revelled in it. But the denouncers were on edge too: Manuilsky wrote a ten-page denunciation of Vyshinsky: “Dear Comrade Stalin, I’m turning to you about the case of Vyshinsky . . . Abroad without the control of the CC, he is a person of petit bourgeois and boundless self-importance, for whom his own interests take precedence.” Stalin decided to do nothing with this but, as always, he informed the victim: later that day, Vyshinsky was found staring into oblivion: “I’m only theoretically alive. I just got through the day. Well at least that’s something, thank God!”

  The overriding rule was to conceal nothing from Stalin: Zhdanov neutralized his crisis in Leningrad, Khrushchev, his youthful Trotskyism, by submissive confession to Stalin. Stalin’s eye for any weakness was aquiline: when Vyshinsky felt ill and walked out of a diplomatic meeting, Stalin heard about it instantly and phoned his subordinate, Gromyko: “What happened to Vyshinsky? Was he drunk?” Gromyko denied it. “But the doctors say he’s an alcoholic . . . Oh well all right!”7

  After dinner, Stalin solemnly toasted Lenin whose illuminated bust flickered on the wall: “To Vladimir Illich, our leader, our teacher, our all!” But this sacerdotal blessing ended any remaining decorum. When foreigners were not present, Stalin criticized Lenin, the hero who had turned against him: he even told young Sergo Beria stories about Lenin’s affairs with his secretaries. “At the end of his life,” Khrushchev thought he “lost control over what he was saying.” It was probably after 4 a.m.; the guests were desperately drunk, tired and nauseous but the omnipotent insomniac was awake, vigilant and almost sober.

  There was a short rest to wash their hands, another opportunity to roll their eyes at Stalin’s latest peccadillo: the magnates chuckled at the ever-increasing number of locks on the doors and whispered about another of Stalin’s boasts of his drinking exploits: “You see, even in youth, he’d drink too much!” Then it was back to the dinner which now sank to the level of a Neanderthal stag night.

  Sometimes Stalin himself “got so drunk he took such liberties,” said Khrushchev. “He’d throw a tomato at you.” Beria was the master of practical jokes along with Poskrebyshev. The two most dignified guests, Molotov and Mikoyan, became the victims as Stalin’s distrust of them became more malicious. Beria targeted the sartorial splendour of the “dashing” Mikoyan. Stalin teased him about his “fancy airs” while Beria delighted in tossing Mikoyan’s hat into the pine trees where it remained. He slipped old tomatoes into Mikoyan’s suits and then “pressed him against the wall” so they exploded in his pocket. Mikoyan started to bring spare pairs of trousers to dinner. At home, Ashken found chicken bones in his pockets. Stalin smiled as Molotov sat on a tomato or Poskrebyshev downed a vodka full of salt that would make him vomit. Poskrebyshev often collapsed and had to be dragged out. Beria once wrote “PRICK” on a piece of paper and stuck it onto Khrushchev’s back. When Khrushchev did not notice, everyone guffawed. Khrushchev never forgot the humiliation.

  Sometimes Svetlana popped in during dinner but could not hide her embarrassment and distaste. She thought the magnates resembled “Peter the Great’s boyars” who had almost killed themselves with drink to entertain the Tsar at his drunken “Synod.”

  After dinner, “Stalin played the gramophone, considering it his duty as a citizen. He never left it,” said Berman. He relished his comic records, including one of the “warbling of a singer accompanied by the yowling and barking of dogs” which always made him laugh with mirth. “Well, it’s still clever, devilishly clever!” He marked the records with his comments: “Very good!”

  Stalin urged his grandees to dance but this was no longer the exhilarating whirligig of Voroshilov and Mikoyan tripping the light fantastic. This too had become a test of power and strength. Stalin himself “shuffled around with his arms spread out” in Georgian style, though he had “a sense of rhythm.”

  “Comrade Joseph Vissarionovich, how strong you are!” chirped the Politburo. Then he stopped and became gloomy: “Oh no, I won’t live long. The physiological laws are having their way.”

  “No no!” Molotov chorused. “Comrade Joseph Vissarionovich we need you, you still have a long life ahead of you!”

  “Age has crept up on me and I’m already an old man!”

  “Nonsense. You look fine. You’re holding up marvellously . . .”

  When Tito was present, Stalin waved away these reassurances and looked at his guest whose assassination he would later order: “Tito should take care of himself in case anything happens to him. Because I won’t live long.” He turned to Molotov: “But Vyacheslav Mikhailovich will remain here.” Molotov squirmed. Then, in a bizarre demonstration of his virility, Stalin declared: “There’s still strength in me!” He slipped both arms around Tito’s arms and thrice lifted him off the floor in time to the Russian folk song on the gramophone, a pas de deux that was the tyrannical equivalent of Nureyev and Fonteyn.

  “When Stalin says dance,” Khrushchev told Mikoyan, “a wise man dances.” He made the sweating Khrushchev drop to his haunches and do the gopak that made him look like “a cow dancing on ice.” Bulganin “stomped.” Mikoyan, the “acknowledged dancer,” still managed his wild lezginka, and “our city dancer” Molotov immaculately waltzed, displaying his unlikely terpsichorean talent. Ever since the thirties, Molotov’s party trick had been gravely slow-dancing with other men to the guffaws of Stalin: his last male partner, Postyshev, had been shot long ago.

  Polish security boss Berman was amazed when the Soviet Foreign Minister asked him to slow-dance to a waltz. “I just moved my feet in rhythm like the woman,” said Berman. “Molotov led. He wasn’t a bad dancer. I tried to keep in step but what I did resembled clowning more than dancing. It was pleasant but with an inner tension.” Stalin watched from the gramophone, grinning roguishly as Molotov and Berman glided across the floor. It was Stalin who “really had fun. For us,” said Berman, “these dancing sessions were a good opportunity to whisper to each other things that couldn’t be said out loud.” Molotov warned Berman “about being infiltrated by various hostile organizations,” a warning prearranged with Stalin.251

  There were rarely women at these dinners but they were sometimes invited for New Year’s Eve or on Stalin’s birthday. When Nina Beria was at Kuntsevo with her husband, Stalin asked her why she was not dancing. She said she was not in the mood so Stalin went over to a young actor and ordered him to ask Nina to dance. This was to tease the jealous Beria who was furious. Svetlana hated her visits to these orgies. Stalin insisted she dance too: “Well go on, Svetlana, dance! You’re the hostess so dance!”

  “I’ve already danced, Papa. I’m tired.” Stalin pulled her hair, expressing his “perverse affection in its brutish form.” When she tried to flee, he called: “Comrade Mistress, why have you left us poor unenlightened creatures without . . . direction? Lead us! Show us the way!”

  When Zhdanov moved to the piano, they sang religious hymns, White anthems and Georgian folk songs like “Suliko.” When Georgian actors and directors such as Chiaureli were present, the entertainment was more elevated. Chiaureli’s “imitations, songs, anecdotes made Stalin laugh.” Stalin loved singing and was very good at it. The two choirboys, Stalin and Voroshilov, joined Mikoyan, Beria and Zhdanov at the piano.252

  It was almost dawn but the haunting nostalgia of these songs from those lost worlds of seminaries and church choirs was instantly shattered by Stalin’s explosions of anger and contempt. “A reasonable interrogator,” said Khrushchev, “would not behave with a hardened criminal the way Stalin behaved with friends at his table.” When Mikoyan disagreed with Stalin, he flared up: “You’ve all got old. I’ll replace you all.”

  At about 5 a.m., Stalin dismissed his exhausted comrades who were often so drunk they could hardly move. The guards ordered the cars round to the front an
d the chauffeurs “dragged away their charges.” On the way home, Khrushchev and Bulganin lay back, relieved to have survived: “one never knows,” whispered Bulganin, “if one’s going home or to prison.”

  The guards locked the doors of the dacha and retired to their guardhouse. Stalin lay on one of his divans and started to read. Finally, drink and exhaustion soothed this obsessional Dynamo. He slept. His bodyguards noted the light go out in Stalin’s quarters: “no movement.”8

  47

  Molotov’s Chance: “You’ll Do Anything When You’re Drunk!”

  The war,” Stalin admitted, “broke me.” By October 1945, he was ill again. Suddenly at dinner, he declared: “Let Vyacheslav go to work now. He’s younger.” Kaganovich, sobbing, begged Stalin not to retire. There is no less enviable honour than to be appointed the heir of a murderous tyrant. But now Molotov, the first of a deadly line of potential successors, got his chance to act as proxy leader.

  On 9 October, Stalin, Molotov and Malenkov voted “to give Comrade Stalin a holiday of a month and a half”—and the Generalissimo set off in his special train for Sochi and then Gagra on the Black Sea. Sometime between 9 and 15 October, Stalin suffered a serious heart attack. A photograph in the Vlasik family archive shows a clearly ailing Stalin, followed by an anxious Vlasik, probably arriving at Sochi, now a sizeable green two-storey mansion built around a courtyard. Then he headed south to Coldstream near Gagra. This was Stalin’s impregnable eyrie, cut out of the rock, high on a cliff over the sea. Rebuilt, by Merzhanov, into a green southern house that closely resembled Kuntsevo, this became his main southern residence for the rest of his life, a sort of secret Camp David. Its studded wooden gates could only be reached by a “narrow and sharply serpentine road.” It was completely surrounded by a Georgian veranda and there was a large sunroof. A rickety wooden summerhouse perched on the edge of the mountain.253

  In this beautiful isolation, Stalin recuperated in a restful and hermetic holiday rhythm, sleeping all morning, walking during the day, breakfasting on the terrace, reading late, receiving a stream of paperwork, including the two files he never missed: NKGB reports and translations of the foreign press. Perhaps because he so closely supervised the Soviet press, he had surprising faith in foreign journalists.

  During his absence, Molotov ran the government with Beria, Mikoyan and Malenkov, the Politburo Four. But Molotov’s moment in the sun was soon overshadowed by unsettling rumours that Stalin was dying, or already dead. On 10 October, TASS, the Soviet news agency, announced that “Comrade Stalin has left for a rest.” But this only awakened curiosity and aroused Stalin’s vigilance. The Chicago Tribune reported that Stalin was incapacitated. His successors would surely be Molotov and Marshal Zhukov—a report sent southwards as “Rumours in Foreign Press on the State of Health of Comrade Stalin.” Stalin’s suspicions deepened when he read an interview with Zhukov in which the Marshal took the credit for victory in the war, only deigning to praise Stalin rather late in the proceedings. Stalin focused on why these rumours had appeared. Who had spread them, and why had Soviet honour, in his person, been desecrated?

  Perhaps “our Vyacheslav” was so thrilled at last to have the responsibility that he did not notice the brooding in Abkhazia. Molotov was at the height of his prestige as an international statesman. He had only just returned from a series of international meetings. There had been tension between them when Stalin had demanded that his Minister put pressure on Turkey to surrender some territory: Molotov argued against it, but Stalin insisted—Soviet demands were rebuffed. In April, Molotov had visited New York, Washington and San Francisco to meet President Truman and attend the opening of the UN. In an unpleasant meeting, Truman confronted Molotov on Soviet perfidy in Poland. “We live under constant pressure not to miss anything,” Molotov wrote to “Polinka my love” but as ever he gloried in his eminence: “Here among the bourgeois public,” he boasted, “I was the focus of attention, with barely any interest in the other ministers!” As ever, “I miss you and our daughter. I shan’t conceal sometimes I am overcome with impatient desire for your closeness and caresses.” But the essential thing was that “Moscow [i.e., Stalin] really supports our work and encourages it.”

  In September, Molotov was in London for the Council of Foreign Ministers where he pushed for a Soviet trusteeship in Italian Libya, joking drily about the Soviet talent for colonial administration. Unlike Stalin who restlessly pushed for radical leaps, Molotov was a realistic gradualist in foreign policy and he knew the West would never agree to a Soviet Libya. He made some gaffes but Stalin forgave him for the conference’s failure, blaming it on American intransigence. Molotov again complained to Polina of the “pressure not to fail.” He hardly left the Soviet Embassy, watching movies like An Ideal Husband by Wilde, but “Once, only once I went to Karl Marx’s tomb.” In typically Soviet style, he congratulated Polina on her “performance of the annual [textiles] plan” but “I want to hold you close and unburden my heart.”

  Now, with Stalin recuperating and Molotov acting slightly more independently, the temperature was rising. Molotov felt the time was right for a deal with the West. Stalin overruled him: it was time to “tear off the veil of amity.” When Molotov continued to behave too softly towards the Allies, Stalin, using the formal vy, attacked him harshly. “Molotov’s manner of separating himself from the government to portray himself as more liberal . . . is good for nothing.” Molotov climbed down with a ritualistic apology: “I admit that I committed a grave oversight.” It was a telling moment for the magnates: even Stalin and Molotov ceased to address each other informally—no more “Koba,” just “Comrade Stalin.”

  On 9 November, Molotov ordered Pravda to publish a speech of Churchill’s praising Stalin as “this truly great man, the father of his nation.” Molotov had not grasped Stalin’s new view of the West. Stalin cabled a furious message: “I consider the publication of Churchill’s speech with his praise of Russia and Stalin a mistake,” attacking this “infantile ecstasy” which “spawns . . . servility before foreign figures. Against this servility, we must fight tooth and nail . . . Needless to say, Soviet leaders are not in need of praise from foreign leaders. Speaking personally, this praise only jars on me. Stalin.”

  Just as the foreign media was trumpeting Stalin’s illness and Molotov’s succession, Molotov got tipsy at the 7 November reception and proposed the easing of censorship for foreign media. Stalin called Molotov who suggested treating “foreign correspondents more liberally.” The valetudinarian turned vicious: “You blurt out anything when you’re drunk!”

  Stalin devoted the next three days of his holiday to the crushing of Molotov. By the time the New York Times had written about Stalin’s illness “in a ruder way even than has taken place in the French yellow press,” he decided to teach Molotov a lesson, ordering the Four to investigate—was it Molotov’s mistake? The other three tried to protect Molotov by blaming a minor diplomat but they admitted he was following Molotov’s instructions. On 6 December, Stalin cabled Malenkov, Beria and Mikoyan, ignoring Molotov, and attacking their “naïvety” in trying to “paper over the affair” while covering up “the sleight of hand of the fourth.” Stalin was burning at this “outrage” against the “prestige” of the Soviet government. “You probably tried to hush up the case to slap the scapegoat . . . in the face and stop there. But you made a mistake.” Hypocritically referring to the pretence of Politburo government, Stalin declared: “None of us has the right to act single-handedly . . . But Molotov appropriated this right. Why? . . . Because these calumnies were part of his plan?” A reprimand was no longer sufficient because Molotov “cares more about winning popularity among certain foreign circles. I cannot consider such a comrade as my First Deputy.” He ended that he was not sending this to Molotov “because I do not trust some people in his circle.” (This was an early reference to the Jewish Polina.)

  Beria, Malenkov and Mikoyan, who sympathized with poor Molotov, summoned him like judges, read him Stalin’s cable and
attacked him for his blunders. Molotov admitted his mistakes but thought it was unfair to mistrust him. The three reported to Stalin that Molotov had even “shed some tears” which must have satisfied the Generalissimo a little. Molotov then wrote an apology to Stalin which, one historian writes, was “perhaps the most emotional document of his life in politics.”

  “Your ciphered cable is imbued with a profound mistrust of me, as a Bolshevik and a human being,” wrote the lachrymose Molotov, “and I accept this as a most serious warning from the Party for all my subsequent work, whatever job I may have. I will seek to excel in deeds to restore your trust in which every honest Bolshevik sees not merely personal trust but the Party’s trust—something I value more than life itself.”

  Stalin let Molotov stew for two days, then at 1:15 a.m. on 8 December replied to the Four again, restoring his errant deputy to his former place as First Deputy Premier. But Stalin never spoke of Molotov as his successor again and stored up these mistakes to use against him.254 1

  This was only the beginning. Stalin was feeling better but he had mulled angrily over the challenges from abroad, indiscipline at home, disloyalty in his circle, impertinence among his marshals. He was bored and depressed by stillness and solitude but his angry energy and zest for life were stimulated by struggle. He revelled in the excitement of personal puppeteering and ideological conflict. Returning in December with a glint in his yellow eyes and a spring in his step, he resolved to reinvigorate Bolshevism and to diminish his over-mighty boyars in a deft sweep of arrests and demotions.

  Having shaken Molotov, Stalin turned on Beria and Malenkov. He did not need to invent the scandal. When Vasily Stalin had visited him at Potsdam, he reported the disastrous safety record of Soviet planes: of 80,300 planes lost in the war, 47 percent were due to accidents, not enemy fire or pilot error. Stalin had mused over this on holiday, even inviting the Aircraft Production Minister, Shakhurin,255 to Sochi. Then he ordered the investigation of an “Aviators’ Case” against Shakhurin and the Air Force Commander, Air Marshal Novikov, one of the heroes of the war, whom he had jokingly threatened at de Gaulle’s banquet.