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We are especially well informed on this holiday because not only do we have Stalin’s correspondence with Kaganovich, in charge in Moscow, but the GPU took photographs which they mounted in a special album for Stalin, and Lakoba, the host in Abkhazia, also kept notes: therefore we have both sound and vision.
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After WW2, Stalin reminisced about how, in exile, “I, as a peasant, was given 8 roubles monthly. Ordzhonikidze as a nobleman got 12 roubles so deported noblemen cost the Treasury 50% more than peasants.” The other trained male nurse in the leadership was Poskrebyshev.
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Stalin treated Sergo like an uncontrollable younger brother: “You were trouble-making this week,” Stalin wrote typically to him, “and you were successful. Should I congratulate you or not?” On another occasion: “Tomorrow, the meeting on bank reform. Are you prepared? You must be.” When Stalin scolded him, he added, “Don’t dress me down for being rude… Actually, tell me off as much as you like.” He usually signed himself “Koba.” Sergo’s notes almost always disagree with some decision of Stalin’s: “Dear Soso,” he carped in one note, “is the new Russia being built by Americans?” He was quite capable of giving Stalin instructions too: “Soso, they want to put Kaganovich on civil aviation… Write to Molotov and Kaganovich and tell them not to!”
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The Gagra house is one of the most beautiful of Stalin’s residences but also the least accessible. The children later got their own houses. A snake path of steps twists down to the sea. Yet it is invisible from the land. Like most of these houses, it is still under the control of the Abkhazian presidential security, hidden, eerie but perfectly preserved. Museri adjoins the same secret CC resort, Pitsunda, where Khrushchev had a house as First Secretary and where, in the eighties, Mikhail Gorbachev and Raisa his wife were criticized for building a multi-million-pound holiday house. All remain empty yet guarded in the steamy Abkhazian heat.
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These provincials wanted to meet their heroes and a great amount of time was spent posing for the photographers in the hall where they gathered in eager groups, beaming, in their boots, tunics and caps, around Stalin, Kalinin, Voroshilov, Kaganovich and Budyonny. At the Fifteenth Congress in 1927, Stalin was just one of the leaders who posed with his fans. At the Seventeenth, Stalin is always at the centre. The album is mutilated by the huge number of figures either crossed out or cut out as they were arrested and executed during the following four years: out of 1,966 delegates, 1,108 would be arrested. Few survived.
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Named, of course, after Beria’s former patron, Ordzhonikidze, a friendship that had disintegrated into mutual hatred.
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It was no coincidence that he would become such a fan of Western cowboy movies.
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Among his possessions in his apartment, preserved in Leningrad, is one of his cigarette boxes emblazoned with an unprepossessing portrait of Stalin with a very long nose. The box is opened by pressing the nose.
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When Stalin read Andrei Platonov’s satire on the “Higher Command” of collectivization,
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There was one other returned emigre whom Stalin personally favoured. Ilya Ehrenburg, a Muscovite and Jewish Bohemian novelist, friends with Picasso and Malraux, complained of persecution by the Party. His old schoolfriend Bukharin appealed for him. Stalin scrawled on the letter: “To Comrade Kaganovich, pay attention to the attached document—don’t let the Communists drive Ehrenburg mad. J. Stalin.” Molotov and Bukharin helped Mandelstam. Voroshilov aided his own stable as well as his “court painter” Gerasimov. Kirov protected the Mariinsky Ballet, Yenukidze the Bolshoi. Yagoda patronised his own writers and architects, often meeting them at Gorky’s mansion. Poskrebyshev received the tenor Kozlovsky at home.
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His wife Zinaida was even prissier: she once told Svetlana Stalin that the urbane novelist Ehrenburg “loves Paris because there are naked women there.” It was Zinaida who was tactless enough to tell Svetlana her mother was mentally “sick.”
