Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar

give a window through which the sun can shine (heroism of socialism).”⁹

Stalin often informed Gorky and other writers that he was correcting their articles with Kaganovich, a vision that must have horrified them. At the theatres, Stalin evolved a pantomime of giving his judgement on a new play which was followed to the letter by Kaganovich and Molotov. In the Politburo’s loge and the room behind it, the avant-loge, where they ate between acts, Stalin commented on the actors, plays, even the decor of the foyer. Every comment became the subject of rumours, myths and decisions that affected careers.

Stalin attended a new play on Peter the Great by Alexei Tolstoy, another newly returned emigre writer who, besides Gorky, was the richest author of the Imperium. Count Tolstoy, an illegitimate and renegade nobleman, had returned to Russia in 1923 where he was hailed as the “Worker-Peasant-Count. ” This literary gymnast specialized in understanding Stalin, boasting, “You really do have to be an acrobat.” His Peter the Great play, On the Rack, was attacked by Bolshevik writers. Stalin left shortly before the end, accompanied to his car by the crestfallen director. Sensing Imperial disapproval, the play was attacked viciously inside the theatre until the director returned triumphantly to announce: “Comrade Stalin, in speaking with me, passed the following judgement: ‘A splendid play. Only it’s a pity Peter was not depicted heroically enough.’” Stalin received Tolstoy and gave him “the right historical approach” for his next project, a novel Peter the Great.

This routine was repeated exactly when Kaganovich rejected a new production by the avant-garde theatrical director Meyerhold and was pursued to his car by the disappointed artist. Yet he protected the Yiddish actor Solomon Mikhoels. Like eighteenth-century grands seigneurs, the magnates patronized their own theatres, their own poets, singers and writers, and defended their proteges[69] whom they “received” at their dachas and visited at home. “Everyone goes to see someone,” wrote Nadezhda Mandelstam in her memoirs that provide a peerless moral guide to this era. “There’s no other way.” But when the Party turned against their proteges, the grandees abandoned them swiftly. ¹⁰

The artists were fascinated by Stalin: Pasternak longed to meet him. “Can I meet you?” wrote the poet Gidosh eagerly. Meyerhold appealed to Stalin for a meeting which he said would “lift my depression as an artist” and signed it “Loving you.”

“Stalin not here now,” wrote Poskrebyshev.¹¹

* * *

On 30 July, a month after Hitler’s Night of the Long Knives, Stalin headed down to the Sochi dacha where he was meeting his old favourite, Kirov, who had no wish to be there, and his new one, Andrei Zhdanov, who must have been honoured to be invited. There were four of them because Zhdanov brought along his son, Yury, Stalin’s future son-in-law, a young man whom the Vozhd was to regard as an ideal Soviet man. They had gathered to write the new history of Russia.

Already ill and exhausted, Kirov was the sort of man who wanted to go camping and hunting with friends like Sergo. There was nothing relaxing about a holiday with Stalin. Indeed, escaping from holidays with Stalin was to become a common experience for all his guests. Kirov tried to get out of it but Stalin insisted. Kirov, realizing that “Stalin was conducting a struggle of wills,” could not refuse. “I’m not in a happy mood,” he told his wife. “I’m bored here… At no time can I have a quiet vacation. To hell with it.” This was hardly the attitude Stalin needed or expected from “my Kirich” but had he read such letters, they would have confirmed his already ambiguous feelings for Kirov.¹²

The three leaders and the boy “sat at a table on the balcony in gorgeous weather on the enclosed veranda” of the huge Sochi house with its courtyard and its small indoor pool for Stalin. Servants brought hors d’oeuvres and drinks. “The four of us came and went,” says Yury Zhdanov. “Sometimes we went into the study indoors, sometimes we went down the garden to the wooden summerhouse.” The atmosphere was relaxing and free and easy. In the breaks, Kirov took Yury picking blackberries which they brought back for Stalin and Zhdanov. Every evening Kirov returned to his dacha and the Zhdanovs to theirs. Sometimes the lonely Stalin went home with them. “There were no bodyguards, no accompanying vehicles, no NKVD cars,” says Yury Zhdanov. “There was just me in the front, next to the driver and my father and Stalin in the back.” They set off at dusk and when they turned on the lights, they saw two girls hitchhiking by the roadside.

“Stop!” said Stalin. He opened the door and let the girls get into the middle seats of the seven-seater Packard. The girls recognized Stalin: “That’s Stalin!” Yury heard one whisper. They dropped the girls off in Sochi. “That was the atmosphere of the time.” It was about to change.

However informal it might have been, Zhdanov, like Beria, was one of the few magnates who could have brought his son to attend a meeting with Stalin even though the teenager had known him since he was five. “Only Zhdanov received from Stalin the same kind of treatment that Kirov enjoyed,” explained Molotov. “After Kirov, Stalin loved Zhdanov best. He valued him above everyone else.”¹³

Attractive, brown-eyed, broad-chested and athletic, though asthmatic, Zhdanov was always hearty and smiling, with a ready supply of jokes. Like Kirov, a sunny companion, he loved to sing and play the piano. Zhdanov already knew Stalin well. Born at the Black Sea port of Mariupol in 1896, Andrei Alexandrovich Zhdanov, a hereditary nobleman (like Lenin and Molotov), was the scion of Chekhovian intellectuals. Son of a Master of Religious Studies at the Moscow Religious Academy, who worked, like Lenin’s father, as an inspector of public schools (his thesis was “Socrates as Pedagogue”), and of a mother who had graduated from the Moscow Musical Conservatoire and was herself the daughter of a rector of a religious academy, Zhdanov was the sole representative in top Party circles of the nineteenth-century educated middle class. His mother, a gifted pianist, taught Zhdanov to play well too.

Zhdanov studied at a church school (like Stalin), dreamed of being an agriculturalist, then at twenty attended the Junior Officers’ Training College in Tiflis. This “acquainted him with Georgian culture and songs.” He grew up with three sisters who became Bolsheviks: two of them never married and became revolutionary maiden aunts who lived in his house, dominating Zhdanov and greatly irritating Stalin. Joining the Party in 1915, Zhdanov won his spurs in the Civil War as a commissar, like so many others. By 1922, he ran Tver, then Nizhny Novgorod, whence he was called to greater things.

Straitlaced and rigid in Party matters, his papers reveal a man of meticulous diligence who could not approach a subject without becoming an encyclopaedic expert on it. Despite never completing higher education though he attended Agricultural College, Zhdanov was another workaholic obsessive, who voraciously studied music, history and literature. Stalin “respected Zhdanov,” says Artyom, “as his fellow intellectual,” whom he constantly telephoned to ask: “Andrei, have you read this new book?”

The two were always pulling out volumes of Chekhov or Saltykov-Shchedrin to read aloud. Jealous rivals mocked his pretensions: Beria nicknamed him “The Pianist.” Zhdanov and Stalin shared religious education, Georgian songs, a love of history and classical Russian culture, autodidactic and ideological obsessions, and their sense of humour—except that Zhdanov was a prig.[70] He was personally devoted to Stalin whom he called “Joseph Vissarionovich” but never “Koba.” “Comrade Stalin and I have decided…” was his favourite pompous way to begin a meeting.¹⁴

On the veranda or in the summerhouse, they discussed history, epoch by epoch, on a table spread with revolutionary and Tsarist history textbooks. Zhdanov took notes. The supreme pedagogue could not stop showing off his knowledge.[71] Their mission was to create the new history that became the Stalinist orthodoxy.

Stalin adored studying history, having such happy memories of his history teacher at the Seminary that he took the trouble in September 1931 to write to Beria: “Nikolai Dmitrievich Makhatadze, aged 73, finds himself in Metechi Prison… I have known him since the Seminary and I do not think he can present a danger to Soviet power. I ask you to free the old man and let me know the result.”¹⁵ He had been a history addict ever since. In 1931, Stalin decisively intervened in academia to create the historical precursor of “Socialist Realism” in fiction: henceforth, history was not what the archives said but what the Party decreed on a holiday like this. “You speak about history,” Stalin told his magnates. “But one must sometimes correct history.” Stalin’s historical library was read and annotated thoroughly: he paid special attention to the Napoleonic Wars, ancient Greece, nineteenth- century relations between Germany, Britain and Russia, and all Persian Shahs and Russian Tsars. A born student, he always mugged up on the history of that day’s issue.¹⁶

While Zhdanov was in his element in the discussions in Sochi, Kirov was out of his depth. It is said that Kirov tried to escape by saying, “Joseph Vissarionovich, what kind of a historian am I?”

“Nevermind. Sit down,” replied Stalin, “and listen.” Kirov got so sunburnt he could not even play