Stalin полностью

Certain types of foreign literature were being translated, and, once in Russian (or another Soviet language), they could be incorporated, alongside Lev Tolstoy, into the Soviet canon as “classics of world literature.” This included Cervantes, Molière, Balzac, Goethe, and especially Shakespeare, all of whom were often translated freely, rather than literally.²⁵³ “Shakespearize More!” (an exhortation credited to Marx) had been revived, with propagandists characterizing him as a “people’s bard.”²⁵⁴ For a March 1935 international theater festival in Moscow—Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Eisler, and Edward Gordon Craig participated—the featured Soviet entrant was Shakespeare’s King Lear, which had premiered at the Moscow State Jewish Theater in Yiddish, with Solomon Mikhoels playing Lear.²⁵⁵ Of course, Lear had lost all his territory and descended into insanity.²⁵⁶

TAKE CARE

Local officials all around the Union were reporting to Stalin on steel, chemicals, military hardware. Beria was reporting on Baku oil and Georgian rare metals, the boost in manganese output at Chiatura, the performance of the Tiflis railway shops now named for Stalin, and the output of new plants: the Tiflis machine-tool factory, now named for Kirov; Zestafoni Ferroalloy Plant; Inguri Pulp and Paper.²⁵⁷ Lakoba’s reports concerned tea, citrus, tobacco, and geraniums. He sent crates of tangerines and lemons to Stalin and Orjonikidze in Moscow. But Abkhazia’s resorts left a lot to be desired. “Authority, comrades, does not arise by itself; it needs to be won. It arises where living people get things done, not from books, not from formulas,” he had told the 7th Congress of Soviets of the Abkhaz autonomous republic in March 1935. “You know, comrades, in resort construction we still look very weak.. . . . We have not managed to reestablish our old resorts fully.”²⁵⁸ Nonetheless, the Abkhaz autonomous republic was awarded the Order of Lenin, partly for tobacco production (which was largely the work of family farms, not collectives).²⁵⁹

As the NKVD interrogated ever more Kremlin personnel, Yenukidze’s name inevitably came up.²⁶⁰ Well liked, he ran a regime of favors, doling out unique state resources and using his status as Stalin’s intimate to take care of old friends and solve sticky matters involving elite households.²⁶¹ The fifty-eight-year-old had never married and had not himself moved into the Kremlin, continuing to live in the Metropole, where the central executive committee had had its original offices, but if he was trying to keep his bedding of underage females out of sight, he failed. During testimony, some arrested Kremlin employees mentioned Yenukidze’s “girls.” Irina Gogua, another Kremlin employee who fell into the NKVD’s net, was the daughter of an old Menshevik who had gone to school with Yenukidze in Tiflis. “He was a fantastic guy, very charming, a flaming redhead who, thanks to graying, had become such a soft blond,” she would recall of Yenukidze. “True, his face was pockmarked, even more so than Iosif Vissarionovich’s. . . . You see, it was a paradox. He was accused of debauchery, devil knows what. But he was a very warm person. He had one quality: he hated to say no, he helped people, independent of who they were. He had one weakness: girls who married his closest friends with whom he would fall in love.”²⁶²

What really got Yenukidze into trouble was his quiet disbursal of state funds to help the often destitute families of non-Bolshevik revolutionaries from the underground years, former Communist party oppositionists (Kamenev’s relatives), even former nobles (like himself) for whom he found jobs in the sprawling central executive committee. Kirov’s assassination had made such actions especially sinister but, protected by Voroshilov, Yenukidze was merely demoted on March 3, 1935, to a position in the central executive committee of the South Caucasus.²⁶³ Ivan Akulov, USSR procurator general, became secretary of the central executive committee; Andrei Vyshinsky took over as USSR procurator general.