film-maker Alexei Kapler.43 Yet the fact that his followers exploited anti-Jewish feelings in internal party disputes does not make him personally an anti-semite. As a father, moreover, he had much reason to discourage Svetlana from having anything to do with the middle-aged, womanising Kapler.
His campaign against ‘rootless cosmopolitanism’ cannot be automatically attributed to hatred of Jews as Jews. He moved aggressively against every people in the USSR sharing nationhood with peoples of foreign states. The Greeks, Poles and Koreans had suffered at his hands before the Second World War for this reason.44 Campaigns against cosmopolitanism started up when relations between the Soviet Union and the USA drastically worsened in 1947.45 At first Jews were not the outstanding target. But this did not remain true for long. A warm reception was accorded by twenty thousand Jews to Golda Meir at a Moscow synagogue in September 1948 after the foundation of Israel as a state.46 This infuriated Stalin, who started to regard Jewish people as subversive elements. Yet his motives were of Realpolitik rather than visceral prejudice even though in these last years some of his private statements and public actions were undeniably reminiscent of crude antagonism towards Jews.
Yet Beria and Kaganovich, who was Jewish, absolved their master of anti-semitism.47 (Not that they were moral arbiters on anything.) Certainly Kaganovich felt uncomfortable at times. Stalin’s entourage were crude in their humour. One day Stalin asked: ‘But why do you pull so very gloomy a face when we’re laughing at the Jews? Look at Mikoyan: when we’re laughing at the Armenians, Mikoyan laughs along with us at the Armenians.’ Kaganovich replied:48
You see, comrade Stalin, you have good knowledge of national feelings and character. Evidently what was expressed in the character of the Jews was the fact that they were often given a beating and they reacted like a mimosa. If you touch it, it instantly closes up.
Stalin relented and Kaganovich, hardly the most sensitive of men, was allowed to stay out of the banter. The episode by itself does not exculpate Stalin; and it must be added that some of his remarks to others in the early 1950s were vicious in the extreme about Soviet Jews. Perhaps he turned into an anti-semite right at the end. Or possibly he was using violent language in order to drum up political support. He was too inscrutable to allow a verdict.
What is clear is that the mind of Stalin is irreducible to a single dimension. Some see him as a Russian nationalist. For others the driving force of his ideas was anti-semitism. A further school of thought postulated that in so far as he had ideas they were those of a Realpolitiker; this version of Stalin appears in various guises: the first is a leader who pursued the traditional goals of the tsars, the second is an opportunistic statesman yearning to stand tall alongside the leaders of the other great powers. And there are some — nowadays remarkably few — who describe him as a Marxist.
Stalin’s intellectual thought was really an amalgam of tendencies, and he expressed himself with individuality within each of them. He had started as an adult by looking at the world through a Marxist prism, but it had been Marxism of the Leninist variant — and he had adjusted this variant, at times distorting it, to his liking. Lenin’s Marxism had been a compound of Marx’s doctrines with other elements including Russian socialist terrorism. Stalin’s treatment of Leninism was similarly selective; and, like Lenin, he was loath to acknowledge that anything but the purest legacy of Marx and Engels informed his Marxism–Leninism. But his ideas on rulership were undoubtedly characterised by ideas of Russian nationhood, empire, international geopolitics and a generous dose of xenophobic pride. At any given time these tendencies were in play in his mind even if it was solely the members of his entourage who glimpsed the range of his sources. He did not systematise them. To have done so would have involved him in revealing how much he had drawn from thinkers other than Marx, Engels and Lenin. In any case he shrank from codifying ideas that he sensed would cramp his freedom of action if ever they were to be set in stone.
Stalin was a thoughtful man and throughout his life tried to make sense of the universe as he found it. He had studied a lot and forgotten little. His learning, though, had led to only a few basic changes in his ideas. Stalin’s mind was an accumulator and regurgitator. He was not an original thinker nor even an outstanding writer. Yet he was an intellectual to the end of his days.
53. AILING DESPOT
Stalin’s medical condition had steadily worsened. The cardiac problems from late 1945 compelled him to spend weeks away from the Kremlin. He could no longer cope with the previous burdens of official duty. Chronic overwork was exacting its toll. Having risen to political supremacy, he could have slackened his routines. But Stalin was a driven man. He thrashed himself as hard as he did his subordinates. He could no more spend a day in indolence than he was able to leap to the moon. Stalin, unlike Hitler, was addicted to administrative detail. He was also ultra-suspicious in his ceaseless search for signs that someone might be trying to dislodge his policies or supplant him as the Leader.
His previous medical history included appendicitis, painful corns, laryngitis and probably psoriasis.1 His chronic mistrust of the medical profession had done him no favours. Admittedly even Stalin could not do entirely without doctors; but Kremlin specialists were nervous when treating him and arrests of individuals accused of poisoning Politburo members and other prominent public figures were frequent. Dr Moshentseva offered a bizarre and rather implausible account. When Stalin was brought to the clinic for treatment for an ‘enormous abscess’ on his foot, his face and body were reportedly covered in a blanket and she was instructed to fold back only the bottom edge. Not until later did she discover the identity of her patient.2 Less fortunate was Stalin’s personal physician Vladimir Vinogradov. In January 1952, after giving the Leader a check-up, he advised him to retire from politics to prevent fatal damage to his health. Vinogradov’s frank diagnosis angered Stalin, who could not become a pensioner without risking retaliation by whoever became his successor. The diagnosis of permanent debility might induce his subordinates to gang up on him. (He had certainly given them excuse.) Vinogradov was thrown into the Lubyanka in November. The medical care of the Leader could come at a high price for his doctors.3
Stalin did not disregard his health problems. From the mid-1920s he had taken lengthy summer vacations by the Black Sea, relying on letters and telegrams to keep contact with politics in the Kremlin. Even when on holiday, he went on giving general instructions to his highest subordinates. The vacations got longer after 1945. In 1949 he spent three months in his residences in the south; in both 1950 and 1951 his sojourns in Abkhazia lasted nearly five months.4
He was trying to prolong life and career by mixing Black Sea leisure with long-distance rule. In 1936 he had had a dacha built for himself at Kholodnaya Rechka north of Gagra on the Abkhazian coast. It was a thick-walled stone structure designed by his court architect Miron Merzhanov. It had a dining room, meeting room, billiard room, tea room and several bedrooms — both upstairs and downstairs — and bathrooms. (In fact Stalin went on sleeping on a divan in preference to his many beds.)5 The emphasis was on Soviet stolidity rather than luxury. The only imports were the German shower fittings and the Italian billiard table. Although the carpets were of better quality than any obtainable in Soviet shops, they were poorer than those sold in the Tbilisi markets of his boyhood. He ordered wood panelling throughout the dacha, and the walls of each room were covered with a variety of varnished timber. Apart from the billiard room, Stalin’s main self-indulgence was a long gallery with a film projector and a screen foldable out from the wall. Water was pumped up from the stream at the bottom of the valley immediately to the south. The dacha’s external walls (and this was also true of his daughter’s adjacent dacha) were painted camouflage green.6
Slow on his feet, by the early 1950s Stalin looked like a gargoyle which had dropped off the guttering of a medieval church. His face had a gloomy pallor. His hair had long ago turned the grey of weather-beaten sandstone. No longer holding receptions for distinguished foreign guests, he ceased again to bother about his appearance. His clothes were shabbier than ever. Stalin lived as he pleased. Fir trees masked the buildings from view. Whenever he was in residence, fifteen hundred guards maintained his privacy and security. He alone slept in the residential part of the dacha,7 and he habitually left the choice of bedroom till the last moment for fear of being assassinated.
