Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar

27

Stalin proudly advertised this to the novelist Maxim Gorky in Italy: “He’s a brave, clever, quite modern leader—his real name is Scriabin.” (Did Stalin, always an intellectual snob, add the “Scriabin” to impress Gorky with Molotov’s false association with the composer to whom he was not related?)

28

Throughout his career, he would keep the crown jewels, as it were, the Soviet gold reserve or the number of tanks in his reserve at the Battle of Moscow in 1941, scribbled in his personal notebook. He took a special interest in gold production, which was mostly by forced labour.

29

The Red Army’s Inspector of Cavalry, Semyon Budyonny, born on the Cossack Don, was a former sergeant in the Tsarist Dragoons, decorated during WWI with the St. George Cavalryman’s ribbon, the highest distinction available. He served first the Tsar, then the Revolution, and then Stalin personally for the rest of his life, distinguishing himself at Tsaritsyn in Voroshilov’s Tenth Army and rising to worldwide fame as commander of the First Cavalry Army. When Babel published his Red Cavalry stories, telling of the cruelty, lyricism and machismo of the Cossacks, and Budyonny’s taciturn ruthlessness (and “dazzling teeth”), the furious commander tried unsuccessfully to suppress them. Never rising to the Politburo, he remained one of Stalin’s intimates until the war and, though always devoted to cavalry, studied hard to modernize his military knowledge.

30

Stalin’s ex-secretary, now Editorial Director of Pravda, Lev Mekhlis, actually kept a “Bolshevik diary” for his newborn son, Leonid, in which he confided the crazy fanatical faith in Communism for which he was creating “this man of the future, this New Man.” On 2 January 1923, the proud father records how he has placed Lenin’s portrait “with a red ribbon” in the pram: “The baby often looks at the portrait.” He was training the baby “for the struggle.”

31

Kirov, for example, had not seen his sisters for twenty years when he was assassinated and indeed he had not even bothered to tell them who or where he was. They only discovered when they read it in the papers that the famous Kirov was their brother Kostrikov.

32

These long holidays were formally proposed by his colleagues so the decrees in the archives often read: “At the proposal of Ordzhonikidze” or “To approve the proposition of Comrades Molotov, Kaganovich, Kalinin to grant Comrade Stalin twenty days holiday.”

33

Mukhalatka was the favourite resort of Molotov and Mikoyan, though both also holidayed in orbit around Stalin at Sochi. It remained a Soviet favourite: the resort is close to Foros where Gorbachev was arrested during the 1991 coup d’etat. Naturally, being Bolsheviks, the leaders were always sacking the local officials at these resorts: “Belinsky was rude… not for the first time,” Stalin wrote to Yagoda and Molotov. “He should be removed at once from control of Mukhalatka. Appoint someone of the Yagoda type or approved by Yagoda.” If they did not find the holiday houses to their taste, they proposed new luxuries: “There’s no good hotel on the Black Sea for tourist and foreign specialists and working leaders,” wrote Kalinin to Voroshilov. “To hurry it up, we must give it to the GPU.”

34

In the mid-thirties, Miron Merzhanov, Stalin’s architect, rebuilt the house in stone. The big, dark green house is still there: there is now a museum with a dummy of Stalin at his desk, a Cafe Stalin, and a mini-Stalin theme park in the gardens.

35

But this has been a boon for historians: their main communication was by letter until 1935 when a safe telephone link was set up between Moscow and the south. Trotsky had paraphrased Herzen’s comment on Nicholas I, “Genghiz Khan with a telegraph,” to call Stalin “Genghiz Khan with a telephone.” Yet it is a sobering thought that for several months a year, he ruled with no telephone at all.

36

The driver down south was named Nikolai Ivanovich Soloviev who was supposed to have been Nicholas II’s driver. In fact Soloviev had been General Brusilov’s chauffeur but had once, during the First World War, driven the Tsar.

37

Beria was not the only future monster with whom Stalin concerned himself on this holiday. He also showed a