replied, but there was more to it than that. Beria relished his power: in this, as in many other things, “I couldn’t resist it.” Khrushchev agreed that the dinners were “frightful.”
Sometimes the drinking at these Bacchanals was so intense that the potentates, like ageing, bloated students, staggered out to vomit, soiled themselves or simply had to be borne home by their guards. Stalin praised Molotov’s capacity but sometimes even he became drunk. Poskrebyshev was the most prolific vomiter. Khrushchev was a prodigious drinker, as eager to please Stalin as Beria. He sometimes became so inebriated that Beria took him home and put him to bed, which he promptly wet. Zhdanov and Shcherbakov could not control their drinking and became alcoholics: the latter died of the disease in May 1945 but Zhdanov tried to fight it. Bulganin was “practically an alcoholic.” Malenkov just became more bloated.
Beria, Malenkov and Mikoyan managed to suborn a waitress to serve them “coloured water” but they were betrayed to Stalin by Shcherbakov. After swallowing some colossal brandies, Mikoyan staggered out of the dining room and found a little room next door with a sofa and a basin. He splashed his face with water, lay down and managed to sleep for a few minutes, which became a secret habit. But Beria sneaked to Stalin who was already turning against the Armenian: “Want to be smarter than the rest, don’t you!” Stalin said slowly. “See you don’t regret it later!” This was always the threat chez Stalin.4
Stalin’s
“We’ll see about that!” scoffed Stalin who joined Beria in “pumping” the Hungarian with drink.
In summertime, the guests staggered outside onto the verandas. Stalin asked Beria or Khrushchev’s advice on his roses (which he lovingly clipped), lemons and kitchen garden. Stalin supervised the planting of a vegetable garden where he devised new varieties such as crossing pumpkins with water melons. He fed the birds every day. Once, Beria built a greenhouse as a present to Stalin. “What fool ordered this?” Stalin asked. “How much electricity do you spend on floodlights?” He had it destroyed.
The standard of drunken horseplay was not much better than a university fraternity house. Khrushchev and Poskrebyshev drunkenly pushed Kulik into the pond—they knew Stalin had lost respect for the buffoon. Kulik, famously strong, jumped out soaking and chased Poskrebyshev who hid in the bushes. Beria warned: “If anyone tried something like that on me, I’d make mincemeat of them.” Poskrebyshev was regularly pushed in until the guards became so worried that a drunken magnate would drown that they discreetly drained the pond. The infantilism delighted Stalin: “You’re like little children!”
One evening, Beria suggested that they do some shooting in the garden. There were quails in a cage. “If we don’t shoot them,” said Beria, “the guards’ll eat them!” The Leader, who was probably already drunk, staggered out and called for guns. Stalin, old, weak and tipsy, not to mention his frail left arm, first felt “giddy” and fired his gun at the ground, only just missing Mikoyan. He then fired it in the air and managed to pepper his bodyguards, Colonels Tukov and Khrustalev, with shot. Afterwards Stalin apologized to them but blamed Beria.[249]
In the dining room, the maids, plump peasant women wearing white pinafores, like Victorian nurses, emerged with an array of Georgian dishes which they laid on the sideboard or the other end of the long table, then disappeared. When one of them was serving tea to Stalin and the Polish leaders, she stopped and hesitated. Stalin noticed immediately: “What’s she listening to?” If there were no foreign eminences, dinner was served by one of the housekeepers, usually Valechka, and a bodyguard. The guests helped themselves, then joined Stalin at the table.
“Gradually Stalin began to take a great interest in his food,” recalled Mikoyan. The weary Generalissimo was fuelling his failing energy with “enormous quantities of food suitable for a much larger man.” “He ate at least twice as much as I did,” wrote Mikoyan. “He took a deep plate, mixed two soups in it, then in a country custom that I knew from my own village, crumbled bread into the hot soup and covered it all by another plate—and then ate it all up to the end. Then there would be entrees, the main course and lots of meat.” He liked fish, especially herring, but “he also liked game—guinea-fowl, ducks, chickens” and boiled quails. He even invented a new dish which he called
The dinners were a sort of culinary imperialism, designed to impress with their simplicity yet awe with their power—and they worked. While the independent Yugoslavs were appalled by the coarseness of the company, the pliant Poles were impressed by the “delicious roast bear” and regarded their host as “a charming man” who treated them with paternal warmth, always asking if their families enjoyed their Crimean holidays. With outsiders, Stalin retained his earlier gift of being a masterful practitioner of “the human touch.” This charm had its limits. Bierut persisted in asking Stalin what had happened to the Polish Communists who had disappeared in 1937.
“Lavrenti, where are they?” Stalin asked Beria. “I told you to look for them, why haven’t you found them?” Stalin and Beria shared a relish for these sinister games. Beria promised to look for the vanished Poles but when Stalin was not listening, he turned on Bierut: “Why fuck around with Joseph Vissarionovich? Fuck off and leave him alone. Or you’ll regret it.” Bierut did not mention his lost friends again.
Stalin suffered from bad teeth which affected his court since he would only eat the softest lamb or the ripest fruit. His dentures, when they were fitted, unleashed yet another vicious competition. This gourmand also insisted on Bolshevik austerity, two instincts that were hard to match as his courtiers competed to procure the choicest cuts for him. Once he enjoyed a delicious lamb but asked a bodyguard: “Where did you get the lamb?”
“The Caucasus,” replied the guard.
“How did you fuel the plane? With water? This is one of Vlasik’s pranks!” [250] Stalin ordered a farm to be built at Kuntsevo where cows, sheep and chickens could be kept and the lake stocked with fish, and this was managed by a special staff of three agricultural experts. When Beria delivered thirty turbots, Stalin teased his guards: “
“That trickster can’t be trusted,” said Stalin. Despite his swelling paunch, Stalin criticized the spreading flab of “Malanya” Malenkov, ordering him to take exercise in order to “recover the look of a human being.” Beria joined in teasing his ally: “So, that human-being look, where is it? Have you lost any weight?” But Khrushchev’s gluttony entertained Stalin who whispered to the guards: “He needed more than two fish and some pheasants, the glutton!” Yet he encouraged the spherical Khrushchev to eat more: “Look! The giblets, Nikita. Have you tried them yet?”
The potentates tried to control their diets by living on fruit and juices one day a week to “unload,” but it did not seem to work. Beria insisted on eating vegetables as his diet, for he was already as fat as Malenkov.
“Well Comrade Beria, here’s your grass,” announced Stalin’s housekeeper.5
Stalin believed his dinners resembled a “political dining society” but his “fellow intellectual” Zhdanov persuaded him their wide-ranging discussions were the equivalent of the
At dinner, Zhdanov, “the Pianist,” was the most loquacious, showing off about his latest cultural campaign or grumbling that Molotov should have let him annex Finland, while his chief rival, the obese super-clerk, Malenkov, was usually silent—“extreme caution with Stalin” was his policy. Beria, the most sycophantic yet the most irreverent, was artful at provoking and manipulating Stalin or, as his wife put it, “playing with the tiger”: he could shoot down anyone else’s proposal if they had not first checked it with him. Beria was “very powerful” because he could “pick the exact moment to… turn Stalin’s goodwill or ill will to his advantage.”
