Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar

was distinguished by its sophisticated tastes and weakness for literature,” wrote Nadezhda Mandelstam. “The Chekists were the avant-garde of the New People.” The grand seigneur of this avant- garde was Yagoda, thirty-nine, who now fell in love with Gorky’s daughter-in-law, Timosha; she was “young, very beautiful, merry, simple, delightful” and married to Max Peshkov.

Son of a jeweller, trained as a statistician and learning pharmacy as a chemist’s assistant, Genrikh Yagoda (his real first name was Enoch), who had joined the Party in 1907, was also from Nizhny Novgorod, which gave him his calling card. “Superior to” the creatures that followed him, according to Anna Larina, Yagoda became “a corrupt… careerist,” but he was never Stalin’s man. He had been closer to the Rightists but swapped sides in 1929. His great achievement, supported by Stalin, was the creation by slave labour of the vast economic empire of the Gulags. Yagoda himself was devious, short and balding, always in full uniform, with a taste for French wines and sex toys: another green-fingered killer, he boasted that his huge dacha bloomed with “2000 orchids and roses,” while spending almost four million roubles decorating his residences.[48] He frequented Gorky’s houses, courting Timosha with bouquets of his orchids. ⁵ Gorky was appointed head of the Writers’ Union and advised Stalin to scrap the RAPP, which was abolished in April 1932, causing both delight and confusion among the intelligentsia, who eagerly hoped for some improvement. Then came this invitation.

Playing ominously with a pearl-handled penknife and now suddenly “stern,” with a “taste of iron” in his voice, Stalin proposed: “The artist ought to show life truthfully. And if he shows our life truthfully he cannot fail to show it moving to socialism. This is, and will be, Socialist Realism.” In other words, the writers had to describe what life should be, a panegyric to the Utopian future, not what life was. Then there was a touch of farce, as usual provided unconsciously by Voroshilov: “You produce the goods that we need,” said Stalin. “Even more than machines, tanks, aeroplanes, we need human souls.” But Voroshilov, ever the simpleton, took this literally and interrupted Stalin to object that tanks were also “very important.”

The writers, Stalin declared, were “engineers of human souls,” a striking phrase of boldness and crudity— and he jabbed a finger at those sitting closest to him.

“Me? Why me?” retorted the nearest writer. “I’m not arguing.”

“What’s the good of just not arguing?” interrupted Voroshilov again. “You have to get on with it.” By now, some of the writers were drunk on Gorky’s wine and the heady aroma of power. Stalin filled their glasses. Alexander Fadeev, the drunken novelist and most notorious of literary bureaucrats, asked Stalin’s favourite Cossack novelist, Mikhail Sholokhov, to sing. The writers clinked glasses with Stalin.

“Let’s drink to the health of Comrade Stalin,” called out the poet Lugovskoi. The novelist Nikoforov jumped up and said: “I’m fed up with this! We’ve drunk Stalin’s health one million one hundred and forty-seven thousand times. He’s probably fed up with it himself…”

There was silence. But Stalin shook Nikoforov’s hand: “Thank you, Nikoforov, thank you. I am fed up with it.”⁶

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Nonetheless Stalin never tired of dealing with writers. Mandelstam was right when he mused that poetry was more respected in Russia, where “people are killed for it,” than anywhere else. Literature mattered greatly to Stalin. He may have demanded “engineers of the human soul” but he was himself far from the oafish philistine which his manners would suggest. He not only admired and appreciated great literature, he discerned the difference between hackery and genius. Ever since the seminary in the 1890s, he had read voraciously, claiming a rate of five hundred pages daily: in exile, when a fellow prisoner died, Stalin purloined his library and refused to share it with his outraged comrades. His hunger for literary knowledge was almost as driving as his Marxist faith and megalomania: one might say these were the ruling passions of his life. He did not possess literary talents himself but in terms of his reading alone, he was an intellectual, despite being the son of a cobbler and a washerwoman. Indeed, it would be no exaggeration to say that Stalin was the best-read ruler of Russia from Catherine the Great up to Vladimir Putin, even including Lenin who was no mean intellectual himself and had enjoyed the benefits of a nobleman’s education.

“He worked very hard to improve himself,” said Molotov. His library consisted of 20,000 well-used volumes. “If you want to know the people around you,” Stalin said, “find out what they read.” Svetlana found books there from the Life of Jesus to the novels of Galsworthy,[49] Wilde, Maupassant and later Steinbeck and Hemingway. His granddaughter later noticed him reading Gogol, Chekhov, Hugo, Thackeray and Balzac. In old age, he was still discovering Goethe. He “worshipped Zola.”

The Bolsheviks, who believed in the perfectibility of the New Man, were avid autodidacts, Stalin being the most accomplished and diligent of all. He read seriously, making notes, learning quotations, like an omnipotent student, leaving his revealing marginalia in books varying from Anatole France to Vipper’s History of Ancient Greece. He had “a very good knowledge of antiquity and mythology,” recalled Molotov. He could quote from the Bible, Chekhov and Good Soldier Svejk, as well as Napoleon, Bismarck and Talleyrand. His knowledge of Georgian literature was such that he debated arcane poetry with Shalva Nutsibidze, the philosopher, who said, long after Stalin was no longer a god, that his editorial comments were outstanding. He read literature aloud to his circle—usually Saltykov-Shchedrin or a new edition of the medieval Georgian epic poem by Rustaveli, The Knight in the Panther Skin. He adored The Last of the Mohicans, amazing a young translator whom he greeted in faux–Red Indian: “Big chief greets paleface!”

His deeply conservative tastes remained nineteenth century even during the Modernist blossoming of the twenties: he was always much happier with Pushkin and Tchaikovsky than with Akhmatova and Shostakovich. He respected intellectuals, his tone changing completely when dealing with a famous professor. “I’m very sorry that I’m unable to satisfy your request now, illustrious Nikolai Yakovlevich,” he wrote to the linguistics professor Marr. “After the conference, I’ll be able to give us 40–50 minutes if you’ll agree…”

Stalin could certainly appreciate genius, but as with love and family, his belief in Marxist progress was brutally paramount. He admired that “great psychologist” Dostoevsky but banned him because he was “bad for young people.” He enjoyed the satires of the Leningrad satirist Mikhail Zoshchenko so much, even though they mocked Soviet bureaucrats, he used to read extracts to his two boys, Vasily and Artyom, and would laugh at the end: “Here is where Comrade Zoshchenko remembered the GPU and changed the ending!”—a joke typical of his brutal cynicism crossed with dry gallows humour. He recognized that Mandelstam, Pasternak and Bulgakov were geniuses, but their work was suppressed. Yet he could tolerate whimsical maestros: Bulgakov and Pasternak were never arrested. But woe betide anyone, genius or hack, who insulted the person or policy of Stalin—for the two were synonymous.

His comments are most fascinating when he was dealing with a master like Bulgakov whose Civil War play, Days of the Turbins, based on his novel The White Guard, was Stalin’s favourite: he saw it fifteen times. When Bulgakov’s play Flight was attacked as “anti-Soviet and Rightist,” Stalin wrote to the theatre director: “It’s not good calling literature Right and Left. These are Party words. In literature, use class, anti-Soviet, revolutionary or anti-revolutionary but not Right or Left… If Bulgakov would add to the eight dreams, one or two where he would discover the international social content of the Civil War, the spectator would understand that the honest “Serafima” and the professor were thrown away from Russia, not by the caprice of Bolsheviks, but because they lived on the necks of the people. It’s easy to criticize Days of the Turbins—it’s easy to reject but it’s hardest to write good plays. The final impression of the play is good for Bolshevism.” When Bulgakov was not allowed to work, he appealed to Stalin who telephoned him to say, “We’ll try to do something for you.”

Stalin’s gift, apart from his catechismic rhythms of question and answer, was the ability to reduce complex problems to lucid simplicity, a talent that is invaluable in a politician. He could draft, usually in his own hand, a diplomatic telegram, speech or article straight off in the clearest, yet often subtle prose (as he showed during the war)—but he was also capable of clumsy crudity, though partly this reflected his self-conscious proletarian machismo.

Stalin was not just supreme censor; he relished his role as imperial editor-in-chief,[50] endlessly tinkering with other men’s prose, loving nothing more than scribbling the expression that covers the pages of his library—that mirthless chuckle: “Ha-ha-ha!” ⁷

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Stalin’s sneering did not help Nadya whose depression, stoked by caffeine and Stalin’s own stress, worsened.