Stalin: A Biography

Stalin’s actions remained brutal regardless of attempts to placate him — and he systematically undermined the position of those who had authority and prominence after the war.⁷ His methods were characteristically devious. Molotov’s wife Polina Zhemchuzhina was arrested in 1949. Zhemchuzhina was Jewish and Stalin objected to the warmth of her welcome for Israeli envoy Golda Meir in Moscow.⁸ Molotov abstained in the Politburo vote on her expulsion from the party, but then apologised to Stalin:

I declare that, having thought over this question, I vote for this Central Committee decision which corresponds to the interests of party and state and teaches a correct understanding of party-mindedness. Moreover, I confess my heavy guilt in not restraining Zhemchuzhina, a person close to me, from erroneous steps and links with anti-Soviet Jewish nationalists like Mikhoels.⁹

Molotov was not the only leader deprived of his marital partner. Yelena Kalinina and Tamara Khazan — wife of Andrei Andreev — had long been in labour camps (although Kalinina was released in time for her husband’s death).¹⁰

Soviet politicians had to become masters of ingratiation. After a contretemps with Stalin in December 1945, Molotov assured him: ‘I shall try by my deeds to become worthy of your trust, a trust in which every honourable Bolshevik sees not only personal trust but the party’s trust which is dearer to me than my life.’ His ‘crude, opportunistic mistake’ had consisted in allowing excerpts from Churchill’s speeches to be reproduced in Moscow.¹¹ The matter was hardly of great importance but Stalin had refused to see it that way. ‘None of us’, he barked by telegram from Abkhazia, ‘has the right to undertake a unilateral disposition involving alteration of our course of policy. Yet Molotov has arrogated that right to himself. Why and on what grounds? Is it not because such tricks enter his plan of work?’¹² Mikoyan too had to humble himself when Stalin was angered by decisions on grain procurement:¹³

I and others of course can’t pose questions in the way you can. I’ll make every effort to learn from you how to work properly. I’ll do everything to draw the necessary lessons from your severe criticism so that it will help me in future work under your fatherly leadership.

Some father! Some sons! The hands of Molotov and Mikoyan were steeped in the blood of the victims of Soviet state policies, and yet they too had to grovel. They knew they had to approach Stalin as if he were the USSR’s stern but fair patriarch — and just possibly they might survive.

Stalin’s paternal functions involved regular humiliation, and he was inventive in going about this. Molotov asked the Polish communist leader Jakub Berman for a waltz at one of Stalin’s soirées. This infringement of manly convention pleased and suited Stalin. Molotov led the fumbling Berman while Stalin presided at the gramophone. Berman was to put a positive gloss on the episode: the waltz with Molotov had been a chance not to whisper sweet nothings to the Soviet Minister of Foreign Affairs but to mumble ‘things that couldn’t be said out loud’.¹⁴ He contrived to forget how he and Molotov had been degraded for Stalin’s delight.