Stalin: A Biography

These younger men of party and government avidly ascertained his desires. Abkhazian party boss Akaki Mgeladze asked Stalin about his preferences in wine. Among red wines the Leader mentioned his favourite as Khvanchkara produced by peasant methods. This surprised Mgeladze, who had assumed that Stalin would go for the renowned Atenuri or Khidistavi of his native Gori. (Georgians are proud of the grapes of the locality where they are brought up.) Stalin explained that it was really for Molotov’s benefit that he stocked Khidistavi. His other favoured red wine was Chkhaveri.²⁰ For breakfast he took a simple porridge in a milky bouillon; for lunch and dinner he preferred soups and fish — unusually for a man of the Caucasus he had no great longing for meat.²¹ He adored bananas (and he got very cantankerous when presented with ones of inferior quality).²² When everything was prepared, he played host in the Georgian manner and often dispensed altogether with servants. Guests served themselves from a buffet. Drinks were set out on adjacent small tables.²³

The mischievous aspects of Stalin’s dinner parties persisted. Vodka was poured into glasses instead of wine. Sometimes pepper would surreptitiously be shaken into someone’s dish. It was not just horseplay. As before, Stalin wanted to keep people on edge. He loved it if a drink-sodden guest blurted out something indiscreet. He wanted to have dirt on everybody.²⁴ Yet he could also behave with gallantry. When the Georgian actor Bagashvili opined that Beria’s wife Nina needed to escape ‘her gilded cage’, Beria declined to react despite the implication that she was living a life deprived of dignity. She felt and looked insulted. Stalin understood her reaction. Crossing the room he took her hand. ‘Nina,’ he said, ‘this is the first time I have kissed a woman’s hand.’ Beria received a marital reprimand that evening and Stalin had earned an angry woman’s gratitude.²⁵ He may well have been acting hypocritically; but if so, his behaviour was effective; and since he was a man of despotic power, he was usually given the benefit of the doubt by those he sought to charm.

Yet steadily Stalin rid himself of those who had been his intimates since the mid-1930s. Even Vlasik was sacked in April 1952 and Poskrë-byshev in January 1953. Another target for Stalin was Beria. Ostensibly the two were on fine terms. Stalin honoured him in 1951 by entrusting him with the main address on Red Square at the October Revolution anniversary celebrations. Beria suspected that Stalin was up to no good. What worried him was the Leader’s remark that he did not need to show him the text of the address in advance.²⁶

Beria surmised he was being set up to say something that could be used against him. He knew Stalin’s methods only too well, and events quickly proved that he was right to be circumspect. Two days after the anniversary parade, a Central Committee resolution denounced a ‘Mingrelian nationalist group’. Beria was not named in the resolution, but his Mingrelian origin exposed him to further action — and indeed the resolution specified that a Paris-based Menshevik organisation led by Yevgeni Gegechkori, who was the uncle of Beria’s wife, was running an espionage network in Georgia.²⁷ The Mingrelians are a people with a language so distinct from ‘standard’ Georgian that Stalin had never understood it.²⁸ (This, of course, did nothing to allay his newly developed suspicions about them.) Beria had several of them among his political clients, and — with Stalin’s consent — he had given land to Mingrelians in Abkhazia at the expense of the Abkhazians. As arrests of prominent Mingrelians proceeded in the winter of 1951–2, Beria anticipated that he would soon join them. Although Stalin had stopped the purge by spring 1952, Beria noted that he was usually more polite than amicable. These were unpleasant omens. The former head of the NKVD feared that he might return to the Lubyanka in circumstances not of his choosing.²⁹

In September several Kremlin doctors were arrested, the first of many. This followed a confidential denunciation of the treatment of Andrei Zhdanov, who had died in 1948. The writer was Dr Lidia Timashuk. Her denunciation, sent soon after Zhdanov’s demise, was pulled out of the archives and used as grounds for a purge of the medical professors in the Kremlin Clinic. Pravda published an article exposing ‘the assassins in white coats’. This caused panic in the elite of the medical profession. Professor Yevdokimov, Stalin’s dental physician and for many years the Kremlin head of maxillofacial and oral surgery, stayed away from home for a week in case the police came for him.³⁰