Stalin: A Biography

about his personal security: he must have known that peasants — and probably most workers too — would have given him an earful of complaints about the dreadful conditions in the country.

There was an exception to his seclusion. Sister-in-law Maria Svanidze jotted down an account in her diary of an incident on his daughter’s birthday in November 1935. Svetlana wanted to take a ride on the new Moscow Metro and Maria was set to accompany her and her brother Vasili. At the last minute Stalin said he would join them together with Molotov. Kaganovich was flummoxed. Although he had ordered ten tickets in advance, he was alarmed by the security implications of the news that Stalin was going to be involved. When they arrived at Crimea Square, the walls of the newly opened Metro station had not yet dried out but normal passengers were already using it. Bystanders spotted Stalin while arrangements were being made for him and his companions to travel in a separate carriage with its own engine, and when they got out at Okhotny Ryad, the station nearest to the Kremlin, there were ovations from fellow passengers. Resuming their places in the carriage, they travelled onward on the Ring Line until Stalin decided it was time to return home.²⁶

Such an excursion might have been undertaken by Nicholas II if he had still been on the throne. But usually Stalin’s behaviour contrasted with his practice. He gave speeches and wrote articles on Soviet and world politics whereas the Romanovs left it to their bishops to give sermons: tsars did not characteristically write conspectuses of their intentions. Nicholas II was a Christian believer; he felt no need as a ruler to explain his faith to those outside his family. Stalin was of a different mould. He spent much time in the 1920s and 1930s working on manuscripts. It was hard, unremitting work. He dispensed with the services of shorthand typists: he thought they fidgeted too much. He wrote laboriously in his own hand rather than suffer distraction. No emperor since Catherine the Great had such a zest for writing — and Empress Catherine had written mainly to confidential correspondents such as Voltaire and Diderot: Stalin composed his literary stuff for the world. The Romanovs were by and large considerate to their ministers. Stalin enjoyed humiliating his subordinates; he traumatised and killed many of them. He was seldom courteous and never unmenacing. (Often when he turned on the charm, he made them wonder what devilishness he was preparing.) He scared his entourage witless. Not since Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great had there been a Russian ruler who set out to have this effect.

A further point of difference between Stalin and the tsars in their styles of rulership was of a social nature. Repeatedly, he insisted at private gatherings that his political success was attributable to the support of ‘the masses’:²⁷

I don’t deny that leaders have an importance; they organise and lead the masses. But without the masses they’re nothing. People such as Hannibal and Napoleon perished as soon as they lost the masses. The masses decide the success of every cause and of historical destiny.

Tsars did not talk this way. Indeed in June 1937 Stalin went further. Being used to toasting the health of People’s Commissars, he wanted respect to be given to ‘the tens of thousands’ of small and medium leaders: ‘They’re modest people. They don’t push themselves forward and are barely discernible. But it would be blindness not to notice them.’²⁸

He gave sharp expression to this attitude on 7 November 1937 at the October Revolution anniversary dinner, where he delivered a speech unrecorded in the press. The praktiki, he declared, were the intermediaries who maintained the link between the Kremlin and the masses. His rivals in the Soviet leadership in the 1920s had been more popular; but they overlooked the need to nurture the careers of functionaries in the lower ranks. When Dimitrov and others tried to praise him personally, he countered with a eulogy of the praktiki.²⁹ His belief was that the defeat of the internal party oppositions, followed by the purges of recent months, had got rid of those leaders from higher echelons in pre-revolutionary society. He had said this in June 1937 to military commanders after the arrest and execution of Tukhachevski.³⁰ Stalin was eager to prove that he and his surviving associates were better able than the privileged former emigres to understand the needs of the working class and the peasantry. They themselves were from the lower depths — or at least many of them were. No Romanov emperor boasted of having no genealogical excellence.

Yet there was a moment in the Moscow Metro episode when minds turned back to the Imperial epoch. At Okhotny Ryad station Stalin’s group left the train to try out the escalator. Meanwhile the passengers on the platform thrust forward into his carriage and stayed when Stalin returned and the train moved on:³¹

Everything was very touching. J[oseph] was gently smiling the whole time, his eyes were kind [dobrye], kind and gentle. I think what touched him, for all his sobriety, was the love and attentiveness shown by the people for their leader [vozhd]. There was nothing artificial or formal about it. He sort of said about the ovations given to him: the people need a tsar: i.e. a person to whom they can bow low and in whose name they can live and work.

This remark does not seem to refer exclusively to the Russians;³² probably Stalin had all the masses of the former Russian Empire in mind when he said it. Nevertheless he had revealed something important about his understanding of rulership in the USSR. To Stalin’s eyes, the mentality of most Soviet citizens not yet been transformed by the October Revolution. They needed to be ruled, at least to some extent, in a traditional way. And this meant they needed a ‘tsar’.

Stalin was an avid reader of books about Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great. He admired their forceful methods and condoned brutality in pursuit of the interests of the state. Evidently some tsars were more congenial as models than others. Even Ivan the Terrible fell short of being the apple of his eye. For Stalin, Ivan was too unsystematic in repressing his enemies. More generally, though, he adopted certain techniques of rulership from the tsars. Most Romanov rulers maintained an aura of mystery. Too much exposure to public view might have derogated from the dignity and authority of the Imperial throne. Stalin adhered to this tradition. Possibly he did this because he knew he did not sound entirely Russian. In fact there were Romanov emperors who had had the same problem: Catherine the Great was a German princess of the houses of Anhalt and Holstein. In Stalin’s case the difficulty was made greater by the fact that he, a Georgian ruling Russia, had an entourage with many who were also not Russians. Stalin, furthermore, had modified his political style. No longer did he have open office hours when ordinary party militants could come and consult him. He did not have his photograph taken with provincial delegations at Party Congresses; he did not submit his ideas to discussion on public occasions.

Just a few traces of his ‘common touch’ persisted. Despite his enormous workload, Stalin still found time to pen personal notes to individuals who wrote to him about all manner of small matters. When the peasant woman Fekla Korshunova, aged seventy, sent a letter asking permission to present him with one of her four cows, he replied:³³

Thanks, mother [matushka], for your kind letter. I don’t have need of a cow since I don’t have a farm — I’m totally a state employee [sluzhashchii], I serve the people as best I can, and employees rarely have farms. My advice to you, mother, is to hold on to your cow and keep it in memory of me.

This little response is a feather in the scale of his virtues; it is massively outweighed by the scale holding the records of his murderous misanthropy. But it shows that even in the terror years he was capable of kindness to strangers.

Despite rationing the number of his public appearances, Stalin could not avoid giving speeches and having them recorded for Soviet newsreels. The party’s customs could be emasculated but not entirely abandoned. In order to confirm his legitimacy as Lenin’s successor he had to get up at Party Congresses and deliver the keynote addresses just as he was obliged to write articles and booklets explaining the latest versions of Marxist–Leninist doctrine. He never became an outstanding orator. He lacked a sense of timing; often he seemed to quicken up or slow down without a feeling for what he was saying.³⁴ When he emphasised something, he did this with clumsy severity. Yet his primitiveness as a speaker also worked for him. Stalin wrote his own words; his message was always carefully considered. He delivered a speech with brusque directness. He was more like a general addressing his troops than a politician — or at times he was akin to a priest reading out a piece of liturgy