Stalin: A Biography

The frightened communist leaders maintained outward compliance, and no one knew whether the show trials might prove a prelude to wider purges. In the meantime the Eastern Block offered fealty to the October Revolution, the USSR and its leader Stalin. Cities were named after him. His works appeared in all the region’s languages. His policies were accorded official reverence. Yet beneath the surface the popular resentment was immense. The religious intolerance of the communist authorities caused revulsion. The refusal to divert sufficient resources to satisfy the needs of consumers annoyed entire societies. Cultural restrictions annoyed the intelligentsia. No communist government offered the realistic prospect of change and all of them were firmly regarded as Soviet puppet ensembles. Countries in western Europe displayed intermittent irritation at the USA’s hegemony; but the anger at the USSR’s rule was wider and deeper in eastern Europe. Without the Soviet military occupation and the penetration by the MVD, no communist regime would have endured more than a few days by the early 1950s. Stalin had acquired the regional buffer zone he craved, but only at the price of turning those countries into a region of constant repressed hostility to his purposes. His political victory in 1945–8 was bound in the end to prove a Pyrrhic one.

48. STALINIST RULERSHIP

Putting aside his Stavka work in 1945, Stalin had picked up the routines of his social life. His options had been narrowed by his own actions. In the mid-1930s he had turned for company to the extended families of the Alliluevs and Svanidzes. But then he had killed or arrested several of them, and the survivors were in a state of psychological shock not conducive to a dinner-party atmosphere.

The Germans had shot Yakov. Vasili was an over-promoted wastrel who irritated fellow officers in the Soviet Air Force and whose drunken parties earned ostracism from his father. Svetlana brought little joy. After breaking with Kapler she set out to inveigle Beria’s son Sergo into marriage — an unlikely venture since Sergo was already married. Thwarted, she instead married Grigori Morozov against Stalin’s wishes in 1943. The marriage was stormy and a divorce was agreed in spring 1947. That summer Stalin invited her to spend some weeks with him at Kholodnaya Rechka by the Black Sea.¹ He had a dacha built for her down the steep slope from his own much bigger dacha.² Although this was a pleasant gesture, they were not going to share an abode: they were edgy in each other’s company. Soon she turned her attentions to Zhdanov’s son Yuri, and the couple married in 1949. Stalin showed little enthusiasm even for this unexceptionable match and declined to attend the ceremony; and although he had Svetlana’s children to the dacha, his interest in them was fleeting. Svetlana and Yuri quickly fell out and separated. She exasperated Stalin. Individuals whom he wanted to integrate in his emotional world had to comply with his expectations or be cast from his affections.

Stalin remained a needy person: solitude did not suit him. He coped by joking with his dacha bodyguards. He teased his bodyguard chief Vlasik and his chief aide Poskrëbyshev. He chatted with his housekeeper Valentina Istomina; and even if the rumours of her having been his mistress remain unproven, he derived comfort from her companionship.

Yet these contacts did not make him a happy man, and his thoughts reverted to earlier periods in his life. In 1947 he wrote to a certain V. G. Solomin whom he had known in Turukhansk District in the First World War:³

I still haven’t forgotten you and friends from Turukhansk and indeed must never forget them. I’m sending you six thousand rubles from my [Supreme Soviet] deputy’s salary. It’s not so great an amount but it will still be of use to you.