Stalin: A Biography

The Leader’s dominion involved chronometric regulation. Lunch was taken in the late afternoon around four or five o’clock and dinner was arranged for no earlier than nine o’clock. Stalin lived like this, and the entire ruling group had to adjust its collective body-clock to his habits.¹⁵ Kaganovich aped him to the minute.¹⁶ Molotov coped by taking little naps in daytime; such was his self-control that he was known to announce to his aides: ‘I’m now going to take a rest in the next room for thirteen minutes.’ He got up from the divan like an automaton and returned precisely thirteen minutes later.¹⁷ All knew that the Leader worked from the early evening onwards; everyone in the upper strata of the Soviet elite had to do the same — and their families had to put up with this as the price to be paid for sustaining life and privilege. With the communisation of eastern Europe the schedule of the working day changed there too. Throughout the USSR and across to Berlin, Tirana and Sofia the leading figures in party and government dared not stray from the proximity of the phone. Stalin could ring at any time of the night through to the early hours of the morning.¹⁸

As Stalin’s vacations in the south became longer, he resorted frequently to telegrams. He could not control the entire machinery of state in detail. This had long been obvious to him. ‘I can’t know everything,’ he said to Ivan Kovalëv, Minister of Communications after the Second World War. ‘I pay attention to disagreements and to objections, and I work out why they’ve arisen and what they are about.’¹⁹ Stalin explained that his subordinates constantly kept things from him and that they always concocted a compromise behind the scenes before they reported to him. To him this was tantamount to conspiracy. Only Voznesenski stood out against such practices — and Stalin admired him for this. Stalin hated the ‘insincerity’ of other Politburo members. He might not detect particular cases of trickery but he knew they could trick him, and he functioned on the assumption that they were not to be trusted. The result was that Stalin, depleted in energy, looked for discrepancies between the accounts of one leader and another.²⁰ Any disagreement was likely to lie across fault-lines in policy. Stalin had hit upon an economical way of penetrating the secrets of what was being done in the corridors of the Kremlin.

Information also came to him by secret channels. The ‘organs’ — known as MGB from March 1946 and kept separate from the MVD — regularly reported on their eavesdropping of conversations among the Soviet leaders. Other Politburo members, he knew, were personally ambitious; and since they had repressed millions on his orders, he assumed they could form a violent conspiracy against him. Throughout the war with Germany he had ordered listening devices to be installed in the apartments of military personnel. The practice was applied to a growing list of civilian politicians. Even Molotov and Mikoyan were being bugged by 1950.²¹

Another of his modalities was to cultivate jealousy among his subordinates. There was constant bickering, and Stalin alone was allowed to arbitrate. He seldom allowed the highest political leaders to stay in a particular post for long. Nothing was left settled in the Kremlin: Stalin saw that job insecurity among his potential successors aided his ability to dominate them. The Moscow political carousel flung off some individuals from time to time, and the survivors regularly had to dismount and move from one seat to another. This was not enough by itself. Stalin’s ill health barred him from undertaking the detailed supreme supervision he had exercised in the 1930s and during the Second World War. He needed a dependable individual to act as his eyes and ears in the leadership just as Lenin had turned to him for help in April 1922. Stalin operated with cunning. At any given time after 1945 he had a political favourite, and he sometimes hinted that the favourite was his chosen successor. But such favour was never formally bestowed, and Stalin raised up individuals only to hurl them down later. No one could grasp the levers of power in such a fashion as to acquire the capacity to supplant Stalin.