Stalin полностью

Also on September 15, Kaganovich and Molotov wrote to Stalin of rumors among Berlin journalists that Germany would sever diplomatic relations. “Do not allow hysterical noise in our press, and do not succumb to the hysteria of our journalists,” Stalin advised. “Nuremberg is the answer to our Comintern congress. The Hitlerites could not not curse us if one takes into account that the Comintern congress poured latrine filth over them. Let Pravda criticize them on principle and politically, without street vulgarity. Pravda could say that Nuremberg confirms the Comintern assessment of National Socialism as the most primitive form of chauvinism, that anti-Semitism is the animal form of chauvinism and hatred of humans, that anti-Semitism from the point of view of the history of culture is a return to cannibalism, that National Socialism in that light is not even original, for it slavishly repeats the Russian pogromists of the tsarist period of Tsar Nicholas II and Rasputin.”¹⁷³

STRATIFICATION

Fourteen-year-old Vasily Stalin was having a crisis. He had taken to smoking. Although he had enough wits not to touch his father’s cigarette box, his primitive efforts to hide the odor on his breath by sucking candy failed. His grades had sunk even lower. One day at school, several boys teamed up to thrash him. Stalin called the teacher and asked if Vasily had provoked his assailants; she reported that he had made them angry. “So be it,” he said. “I won’t bother you any longer.”¹⁷⁴ Vasily played soccer after school, which became an excuse for him to skip homework (too tired), according to a note from the Zubalovo dacha commandant to Vlasik (September 22, 1935). “Vasily thinks he is an adult,” the commandant wrote, “and insistently demands we fulfill his wishes, which are often stupid.”¹⁷⁵ Stalin gave his son two months to get his act together, threatening to replace him at home with other boys of exemplary behavior.¹⁷⁶

A letter from seventy-year-old Fekla Korshunova, who lived on her husband’s pension from the “Leader of the Proletariat” peat plant, was forwarded to Stalin in Sochi. She wanted to give him one of her cows as a gift but was unsure that it was a good idea (“That will be clearer to you”). She signed off by noting that she used to receive 15 rubles 64 kopecks per month in pension, but now got 24 rubles. Stalin wrote back (September 30), “Thank you, mama, for your kind letter. I do not need a cow, because I do not have any farmland—I’m just a white-collar employee, I serve the people the best that I can, and white-collar types rarely do their own farming. I advise you, mama, to keep the cow yourself and maintain it in my memory. Respecting You, I. Stalin.”¹⁷⁷

More than 10 million women were employed outside the home—in retail, local soviets, schools, traditional textiles—but they had also barged into industrial employment, a consequence, one trade union official said, of “massive desire.”¹⁷⁸ On October 1, the regime abolished rationing for meat, fish, sugar, fats, and potatoes, portending price rises, but lowered the retail price of bread. The party mobilized agitators at workplaces to impart the “correct” understanding.¹⁷⁹ One typical couple in Leningrad, he a hauler and she a teacher, lived in a room of 150 square feet, the husband and wife sleeping on the bed, the elder son on a cot, two younger daughters sharing another cot (foot to head), and the youngest girl on an ottoman. “That’s how we lived for ten years,” the son, who did homework in the magnificent prerevolutionary Saltykov-Shchedrin Library until midnight, would recall. “And we were happy in our way. The main thing: everyone was studying—even Mama at forty-five years old finished the pedagogical night school.”¹⁸⁰

Amid the endemic shortages, the regime manipulated consumer goods as reward or punishment.¹⁸¹ Elites enjoyed privileged access to staples and luxuries such as restaurant meals or fashionable winter coats.¹⁸² Purchase of desirable goods usually required a special coupon as well as money, and a leather jacket bought for 300 rubles in a subsidized state store by those awarded coupons could be resold at the market for three times that or more—which technically was a crime, but also a way of life. Midlevel NKVD operatives were paid just 150–350 rubles per month (an overcoat cost 700 rubles in 1935), and they, too, had to buy “voluntary” government bonds, usually at a cost of a month’s salary. True, operatives received subsidized meals at work, but higher-ups made at least five times as much in salary and received nearly a thousand rubles extra per month in cash “bonuses.” Bosses’ high living was a constant refrain in secret reports. “That’s enough laughing at the workers, enough starving, enough teasing them like dogs” read an anonymous letter to Zhdanov in 1935. “Our enemies are our aristocrats who harm the working people.”

FOREIGN POLICY REVEALED