Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar

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Yury Zhdanov, the boy at table with Stalin, Kirov and his father, is the main source for this account and now lives in Rostov-on-Don where he generously agreed to be interviewed for this book. The holiday became famous because of Kirov’s fate soon afterwards: it forms a set piece in Anatoly Rybakov’s novel Children of the Arbat. Yury Zhdanov remembers Stalin asking him: “What was the genius of Catherine the Great?” He answered his own question. “Her greatness lay in her choice of Prince Potemkin and other such talented lovers and officials to govern the State.”

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When the writer Mikhail Sholokhov criticized the praise for the leader, Stalin replied with a sly smile, “What can I do? The people need a god.”

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After the Seventeenth Congress, formal Politburo meetings became gradually less frequent. Often a Politburo sitting was really just Stalin chatting with a couple of comrades: Poskrebyshev’s minutes are simply marked “Comrades Stalin, Molotov, Kaganovich—for” and the others were sometimes telephoned by Poskrebyshev who marked their votes and signed his “P” underneath. By the end of the year, there was one meeting in September, none in October and one in November.

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Instantsiya derives from the nineteenth-century German usage of aller instanzen, meaning to appeal to the highest court.

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The Taurida Palace had been the scene of Prince Potemkin’s extravagant ball for Catherine the Great in 1791 but it was also the home of the Duma, the Parliament gingerly granted by Nicholas II after the 1905 Revolution. In 1918, the palace housed the Constituent Assembly that Lenin ordered shut down by drunken Red Guards. It was thus both the birthplace and graveyard of Russia’s first two democracies before 1991.

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This brain study was part of the rationalist-scientific ritual of the death of great Bolsheviks. Lenin’s brain had been extracted and was now studied at the Institute of the Brain. When Gorky died, his brain was delivered there too. This was surely a scientific Marxist distortion of the tradition in the Romantic age for the hearts of great men, whether Mirabeau or Potemkin, to be buried separately. But the age of the heart was over.

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Maria’s poem reveals both the devotion and cheekiness of Stalin’s female courtiers: “We wish much happiness to our Dear Leader and endless life. Let the enemies be scared off. Liquidate all Fascists… Next year, take the world under your sway, and rule all mankind. Shame the ladies can’t go West to Carlsbad. It’s all the same at Sochi.”

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Even today, those that know such secrets persist in believing, in the words of Stalin’s adopted son General Artyom Sergeev, now eighty, that his “private life is secret and irrelevant to his place in history.”

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Here was Stalin’s version of Harold Macmillan’s “You’ve never had it so good.”

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The star was his wife Liuba Orlova and the songs were by the Jewish songwriter Isaac Dunaevsky. The Russians, emerging from an era of starvation and assassination, flocked to see musicals and comedies—like Americans during the Depression. The style was singing, dancing and slapstick: a pig jumps onto a banqueting table, causing much messy hilarity with trotters and snout.

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Mikoyan and Chubar, a senior official in Ukraine, as the two senior candidate members of the Politburo, were made full members, with Zhdanov and Eikhe, boss of West Siberia, taking their place as candidates.

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This dacha, built by a Jewish millionaire, later known as Dom (house of) Ordzhonikidze and now notorious as “Stalin’s house,” was a favourite of the leadership: the founder of the Cheka, Felix Dzerzhinsky, often stayed there. Trotsky was recuperating there at the time of Lenin’s death when Stalin and Ordzhonikidze managed to ensure he missed the funeral. Stalin (and Beria) stayed here after World War II: the grand billiard room was installed specially