Stalin полностью

230. Inside the street entrance used by visitors to Stalin’s Kremlin office, there was a small, dark waiting room and an elaborate staircase. Upstairs, a broad corridor led to a massive double door, behind which was Stalin’s spacious anteroom. A table there was usually piled with newspapers and other reading materials, paper, and pencils. Another door led to the office of his top aide, Alexander Poskryobyshev, where two or three guards in uniform sat, and whence there was access to Stalin’s office. Stalin’s expansive wing, formally the “special sector” of the Communist party apparatus, had a special door separating it from the offices for the Council of People’s Commissars and the Soviet central executive committee, on the same floor and one floor above. “I had a pass to all areas [of the Kremlin], except to the corridor leading to Stalin’s wing of the building,” wrote Valentin Berezhkov, an interpreter. “A special pass was made out for each trip” to Stalin’s office. Berezhkov, At Stalin’s Side, 203–4. See also Deviatov et al., Blizhniaia dacha Stalina, 57; Shepilov, Kremlin’s Scholar, 16; Iakovlev, Tsel’ zhizni (2nd ed.), 184–5; Yakov Chadaev, in Kumanev, Riadom so Stalinym, 383; and Chuev, Sto sorok, 292.

231. Before the Near Dacha was built, Soviet higher-ups had used a small pensione on the steep banks of the Setun River in the Volynskoe Wood, which was on the ninth kilometer of the Mozhaisk Road (Zubalovo was on the 32nd km). Dmitry Donskoi had once awarded the land as a gift to one of the victors in the Battle of Kulikovo Field, Voevoda Bobrok-Volynsky. In the sixteenth century, the land was claimed by the sovereign; after that it went to the courtier who had conducted the inquiry into the death of Ivan the Terrible’s son, then to the Dolgorukys, the Loanov-Rostovskys. Rudomino, Legendarnaia Barvikha, 44: Deviatov et al., Blizhniaia, 28.

232. Merzhanov had been named central executive committee chief architect in June 1931. In 1929, he had won an open competition to design a resort for the Red Army in Sochi. It was built into a hillside (with a funicular), a triumph of constructivism in harmony with the landscape, completed on July 1, 1934, and named in honor of Voroshilov. (It would win a grand prize at the 1937 Paris Exhibition.) The architect and defense commissar struck up a friendship, and the Soviet press spotlighted his Sochi sanatorium. Merzhanov got many commissions, including the NKVD sanatorium in Kislovodsk.

233. Murin, Stalin v ob”iatiaiakh, 160; Sergeev and Glushik, Besedy o Staline, 41–2; Shepilov, Kremlin’s Scholar, 2. In the nineteenth century, Kuntsevo had become a summer resort for Muscovites (Ivan Turgenev stayed there). It was recognized as a town in 1925–6 and by the mid-1930s counted perhaps 40,000 inhabitants. There was a sewing needle factory, and a dacha that served as the Comintern’s department for international communications (known as facility No. 1). Davydkovo, less than a mile from the territory of Stalin’s dacha complex, became a dacha complex for others in the elite at Stalin’s directive. Trembitskii, Po Zapadnomu okrugu.

234. Zubalovo-4 stood on the left bank of the Medvenka River. Nadya had soured on it and found another spot much farther out on an old estate, Lipki, at the 200km mark on the Dimitrov Highway, where she initiated construction on a new single-family dacha, perhaps to avoid the relatives—both the Alliluyevs and Savnidzes had accommodations at Zubalovo—but Lipki had been finished only after her death. The building of a new Far Dacha, Semenovskoe, would begin in 1937, according to the Near Dacha design, but with bricks from the start. Murin, Stalin v o”iatiakh, 23–4; Alliluyeva, Dvadtsat’ pisem, 30–1, 36. The regime established other elite dacha settlements in the dense forests of largely unsettled rural Barvikha county, along the Moscow River and several tributaries, where there had been estates of the Romanovs (Ilinskoe, Usovo, Znamenskoe) or other grandees: Prince Yusupov (Arkhangelskoe), Prince Golitsyn (Petrovskoe), Baron Meyendorf (Podkushino). The Chekists took a shine to Zhukovka: on the high right bank of the Moscow River, between Barvikha village and Usovo. Rudomino, Legendarnaia Barvikha.