Potsdam Conference drinking, fornicating, or stealing.
Then there was the massive wastage of food at Stalin’s dachas. Vlasik was soon denounced for selling off the extra caviar, probably by Beria whom he had denounced in turn. In 1947, he was almost arrested but, instead, Stalin let him explain his sins: “Every time, the mealtime was changed by [Stalin], part of the dishes were not used. They were distributed among the staff.” Stalin forgave him—and ordered less food than before. Vlasik kept his job.
Yet Vlasik’s mistresses, like Beria’s pimps, informed on him to Abakumov who in turn was denounced by his MGB rival, General Serov, who wrote to Stalin about the Minister’s corruption and debauchery. Stalin stored the letters for later use. Serov himself was said to have stolen the crown of the King of Belgium. By now courtesans, procurers and MGB generals were informing on each other in a merry-go-round of sexual favours and betrayals.
Stalin’s potentates now existed in a hothouse of rarefied privilege, their offices bedecked with fine Persian carpets and broad oil paintings.[266] Their houses were palatial: the Moscow boss now occupied the whole of Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich’s palace. Stalin himself fostered this new imperial era when, after Yalta, he took a fancy to Nicholas II’s Livadia and Prince Vorontsov’s Alupka Palaces: “Put these palaces in order,” Stalin wrote to Beria on 27 February 1945. “Prepare for responsible workers.” He so liked Alexander III’s palace at Sosnovka in the Crimea that he had a dacha built there which he only visited once. Henceforth, the magnates and their children booked these palaces through the MGB 9th Department: Stepan Mikoyan honeymooned at Vorontsov’s palace; Stalin himself holidayed at Livadia. The families flew south on a special section of the State airline—Sergo Mikoyan remembers flying home on this with Poskrebyshev. The children enjoyed their privileges but had to set an example and follow Party dictums: when Zhdanov denounced jazz, Khrushchev broke his son’s beloved jazz records in a temper.
Svetlana Stalin noticed how the dachas of the Mikoyans, Molotovs and Voroshilovs were “crammed with gifts from workers… rugs, gold Caucasian weapons, porcelain” which they received like “the medieval custom of vassals paying tribute.” The magnates travelled in armoured ZiS limousines, based on the American Packards, on Stalin’s orders, followed by another “tail” of Chekists, with sirens blaring. Muscovites called this procession “a dog’s wedding.”
An entire detachment, commanded by a colonel or a general, was assigned to each leader, actually living at their dachas, half an extended family, half MGB informers. There were so many of them that each Politburo family was able to form a volleyball team, with the Berias playing the Kaganoviches. But Kaganovich refused to play on his own team: “Beria always wins and I want to be on the winning side,” he said. In MGB vernacular, the magnate was called “the subject,” their house “the object” and the guards “attachments to the subject,” so the children used to laugh when they heard them say, “The subject’s on his way to the object.” Malenkov often walked to the Kremlin from Granovsky Street surrounded by a phalanx of “attachments.”
The Politburo ladies now had their own haute couture designer. All the “top ten families” went to the
The dressmaker was discovered by Nina Beria but Polina Molotova, the grand “first lady,” was her best client. Once the grandees of Victorian Europe had taken the waters at the Bohemian resort of Carlsbad. Now Zinaida Zhdanova and Nina Beria held court there. “Lavishly dressed and covered in furs,” with her daughter in a “mink stole,” Polina often arrived at the same spa in an official plane with an entourage of fifty. Her daughter Svetlana, a “real Bolshevik princess,” was chauffeured daily to the Institute of Foreign Relations, where many of the elite studied, arriving in a cloud of Chanel No. 5, “wearing a new outfit every day.”
Stalin retained his control of these privileges, continuing to choose the cars for every leader so that Zhdanov received an armoured Packard, a normal Packard and a ZiS 110, Beria got an armoured Packard, a ZiS and a Mercedes, while Poskrebyshev got a Cadillac and a Buick. He consoled the family of Shcherbakov, the Moscow boss who died of alcoholism, with a shower of cash.[268] Stalin specified: “Give them an apartment with a dacha, rights to the Kremlin Hospital, limousine… NKVD special staff… teacher for children…” He awarded Shcherbakov’s widow 2,000 roubles a month, his sons 1,000 a month until graduation, his mother 700 a month, his sister 300. His wife also received a lump sum of 200,000 roubles and his mother 50,000 roubles—sums of unthinkable munificence for the average worker. Here was Stalin’s new imperial order. 3
“Crown Prince” Vasily set a new standard for corruption, debauchery and caprice. Even when officers complained about him to Stalin, they used a special formula to define Vasily’s sacred place: “He is close to the Soviet people because he is your son.” Yet beneath the arrogance, Vasily was the most terrified of all the courtiers: Stalin scoffed that he would “walk through fire” if he ordered it. Vasily especially feared the future.
“I’ve only got two ways out,” he told Artyom. “The pistol or drink! If I use the pistol, I’ll cause Father a lot of trouble. But when he dies, Khrushchev, Beria and Bulganin’ll tear me apart. Do you realize what it’s like living under the axe?”
He callously abandoned his wife, Galina, taking their son Sasha to live with him at the House on the Embankment. She so longed to see Sasha that the nanny secretly met her so she could play with him. But Galina was too frightened to demand a flat or housekeeping from him. Vasily then married Marshal Timoshenko’s daughter Ekaterina, “a pretty Ukrainian.” His apartment was not grand enough for the scions of the Generalissimo and the Marshal so he demanded General Vlasik’s elegant villa on Gogolevsky. He flew back from Germany with a plane filled with “loot”: “golden ornaments, diamonds, emeralds, dozens of carpets, lots of ladies’ lingerie, a huge number of men’s suits, overcoats, fur coats, fur wraps, astrakhan” until Vasily’s house was “bursting with gold, German carpets and cut glass.” There was so much that his wife Timoshenka gradually sold it and pocketed the money. When his marriage to Timoshenka collapsed, he married a swimming star, the statuesque Kapitolina Vasileva, with whom he was happiest. Svetlana thought he was looking for his mother in his wives because he called her “mama” and she even wore her hair in a bun like Nadya.
Vasily commanded the air force in the Moscow Military District, a job beyond his capabilities. He demanded that his strutting entourage call him
Once, Crown Princes proudly drilled their own regiments. Now, like a Western millionaire’s son, Vasily was determined to make his own VVS (air force) football team top of the league. He immediately sacked the football manager, having decided to rescue Starostin, Russia’s pre-eminent soccer manager exiled by Beria, for plotting to assassinate Stalin, from the Gulag. Starostin was called into his camp commandant’s office and handed the
Abakumov, now boss of the Dynamo team, was furious. The MGB kidnapped Starostin. Vasily, using air-force intelligence officers, grabbed him back. Abakumov kidnapped him again. When Vasily phoned the Minister, he denied any knowledge of the footballer but Starostin managed to get a message to Vasily who despatched the head of air- force security to bring him back yet again. That day, Vasily attended the Dynamo game in the government box, with Starostin beside him. The MGB brass were foiled. Vasily called Abakumov’s deputy and shouted: “Two hours ago you told me you didn’t know where Starostin was… He’s sitting here right beside me. Your boys abducted him. Remember, in our family, we never forgive an insult. That’s told to you by General Stalin!”[269]
