At his preferred seat, on the far left side of the table, there would be a generous collection of colored pencils and notebooks and a special deep ashtray of marble, where he could stand up his pipe. Stalin had an electric teapot that he operated himself. A round table, located between two of the four windows, held his multiple black telephones (made by Siemens) and a button to summon the staff. A high-frequency phone, the color of elephant tusk, allowed secure long-distance calls, especially for military and police purposes. Calls into the dacha were answered by a duty officer, who used an internal line to inform Stalin of the incoming call. The despot, if he so desired, would pick up, press the lever, and answer, “Stalin.” One of the phones was an ordinary city line, which Stalin might have installed so callers could bypass the staff to reach him (people from telephone booths sometimes got the dacha accidentally, and eventually the city line would be removed).144 The small dining room, like all the others, had a couch, where he did his reading, as well as a small writing desk. A door led from this room to the glass-enclosed northern veranda, which also had a work/dining table. It was neither luxurious nor ostentatious.
Benito Mussolini, on a typical day in 1938, spent an hour or two every afternoon in the downstairs private apartment in the Palazzo Venezia of Claretta Petacci, whom he called little Walewska, after Napoleon’s mistress. The duce would have sex, nap, listen to music on the radio, eat some fruit, reminisce about his wild youth, complain about all the women vying for his attention (including his wife), and have Walewska dress him. Before and after the daily trysts—Mussolini had recently told his son-in-law that “genius lies in the genitals”—the duce would call Claretta a dozen times, to report on his travails and his ulcer. Claretta recorded his “thoughts” in her diary: Jews were “pigs . . . a people destined to be completely slaughtered”; the English were “a disgusting people . . . they think only with their asses”; the Spanish were “lazy, lethargic . . . eight centuries of Muslim domination, that’s why.” She also recorded their lovemaking and his reveries about her “delicious little body.” Mussolini was not just head of state but head of five different ministries, yet Italy had only very small tanks, a navy whose ships could not leave port for want of air cover, and just ten total army divisions. In August 1938, he was shocked to learn that the finance minister knew of major shortages of artillery while he, the war minister, did not. At such moments, when Mussolini’s inattention, inaccessibility, and incompetence were exposed, it was never his fault. Anyway, what was mere technology compared with spirit, character, will?145
Stalin’s world was nothing like the virile Italian’s. Women in his life remained very few. (There were almost none in positions of power, either.) He still did not keep a harem, despite ample opportunities.146 Inevitably, rumors circulated of affairs: the wife of a deceased politburo member, code-named “Z” (i.e., Zinaida Orjonikidze); the sister of Kaganovich, Roza, who did not exist; a Bolshoi ballerina or singer.147 If Stalin had a mistress, she may have been a Georgian aviator, Rusudan Pachkoriya, a beauty some twenty years his junior, whom he observed at an exhibition at Tushino airfield. She lived in Tbilisi and, while in Moscow, stayed at a sports dormitory (later, she obtained a prominent Gorky Street apartment). Stalin might have met her occasionally in private quarters, under the pretext of conducting aviation “consultations,” according to one of his surviving bodyguards (the sole source on the matter).148 But whatever pleasures Stalin occasionally took, he was married to Soviet state power. A widower twice over, he spent his time seeking succor not in the female body but in military technology and in cadres.