Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar

16

Yet their self-conscious brutality coexisted with a rigid code of Party manners: Bolsheviks were meant to behave to one another like bourgeois gentlemen. Divorces were “frowned upon more severely than in the Catholic Church.” When Kaganovich wrote on the death sentence of an innocent general that he was a “slut”, he just put “s…”. Molotov edited Lenin’s use of the word “shitty” replacing it with “…” and talked prissily about using a “name not used in Party circles.”

17

His revealing thoughts on the kulaks on his scraps of paper include: “kulaks—deserters” then, even more suggestively: “villages and slaves.” One peasant revealed how kulaks were selected: “Just between the three of us, the poor peasants of the village get together in a meeting and decide: “So and so had six horses…” They notify the GPU and there you are: So-and-so gets five years.” Only novelists and poets are really capable of catching the brutish alienation of the villages: Andrei Platonov’s novel The Foundation Pit is the finest of these.

18

At the Bolshoi, Kozlovsky suddenly lost his voice during Rigoletto. The singer peered helplessly up towards Stalin’s Box A, pointing at his throat. Quick as a flash, Stalin silently pointed at the left side of his tunic near the pocket where medals are pinned and painted a medal. Kozlovsky’s voice returned. He got the medal.

19

Kirov, his Leningrad boss, lived in a huge apartment containing a dazzling array of the latest equipment. First there was a huge new American fridge—a General Electric—of which only ten were imported into the USSR. American gramophones were specially prized: there was a “radiola” on which Kirov could listen to the Mariinsky Ballet in his apartment; there was a “petiphone,” a wind-up gramophone without a speaker, and one with a speaker, plus a lamp radio. When the first television reached Moscow just before the war, the Mikoyans received the alien object that reflected the picture in a glass that stuck out at forty-five degrees. As for Budyonny, Stalin wrote: “I gave you the sword but it’s not a very beautiful one so I decided to send you a better one inscribed—it’s on its way!”

20

For example, Kamenev’s wife was Trotsky’s sister; Yagoda was married into the Sverdlov family; Poskrebyshev, Stalin’s secretary, was married to the sister of Trotsky’s daughter-in-law. Two top Stalinists, Shcherbakov and Zhdanov, were brothers-in-law. Later the children of the Politburo would intermarry.

21

In Sholokhov’s novel Virgin Soil Upturned, the Cossacks call off their revolt when they read it. But they also withdraw from the collective farm.

22

“You know Marapultsa,” Voroshilov wrote to Stalin in October 1930. “He was condemned for five years… I think you agree with me that he was condemned rightly.” On another occasion, Voroshilov appealed to Stalin for a “semi-lunatic” he had known since 1911 who was in jail. “What do I want you to do? Almost nothing… but for you to consider for one minute the destruction of Minin and decide what to do with him…”

23

They frequently disagreed with him, certainly on small matters such as a discussion about the Kremlin military school: “Seems that after the objections of Comrade Kalinin and others (I know other Politburo members object too), we can forgive them because it’s not an important question,” Stalin wrote to Voroshilov. Having defeated Bukharin in 1929, Stalin wanted to appoint him Education Commissar but as Voroshilov told Sergo in a letter, “Because we were a united majority, we pushed it through (against Koba).”

24

Doing nothing and lacking “vigilance” was an equally sacred sin in Stalin’s eyes: he called it “thoughtlessness.”

25

Nechist means an unclean devil in peasant folklore.

26

Lenin himself had governed as Premier (Chairman of Sovnarkom) from 1917 to 1924. On his death, his natural successor, Kamenev, had not succeeded to the post partly because he was a Jew not a Russian. Hence Rykov got the job.