Stalin’s power and eminence attracted attention from politicians in the south Caucasus. His presence was a heaven-sent opportunity to impress him. Among those who yearned to be taken up by Stalin was Lavrenti Beria. In 1933 he was First Secretary of the Party Transcaucasian Committee and one bright summer’s morning found an excuse to visit Stalin before breakfast at a Black Sea dacha. Beria was too late. Stalin was already down in the bushes below the buildings and, when Beria caught his first glimpse of him, he saw to his chagrin that Stalin was accompanied by Lakoba. Not that this inhibited Beria from toadying. After breakfast Stalin remarked: ‘That wild bush needs clearing out, it gets in the way of the garden.’ But efforts to remove the roots failed until Beria, snatching an axe off a Muscovite visitor, applied himself. Beria made sure Stalin heard him saying: ‘I can chop under the roots of any bush which the owner of this garden, Joseph Vissarionovich, might point to.’41 He was almost volunteering himself as a purger for Stalin. Few of these convivial encounters were without political content. Stalin, even on holiday, could not insulate himself from the ambitions of intriguers.
Yet most of his visitors were party and government functionaries of the region. No one, not even Molotov or Kaganovich, was a chum as Kirov had been; and Lakoba was more like a seasonal landlord than a genuine intimate. Having put up barricades against psychological intrusion, Stalin restricted himself to playful recreation. He took nieces and nephews on his knee. He sang Orthodox liturgical chants by the piano. He went hunting, challenged visitors to games of billiards and welcomed the presence of female relatives. But he had got harder as a personality. Ice had entered his soul. Molotov and Kaganovich, who immensely admired him, could not work out what made him tick. They later said that he changed a lot after Nadya’s death. But the same works emphasise what made him exceptional: will power, clarity of vision, endurance and courage. Always Molotov and Kaganovich were observing him from the outside. They were in awe of Stalin. While they too were wilful and determined, they appreciated someone who had these qualities to a unique level of intensity. When he acted oddly, they gave him the benefit of the doubt. They thought he had earned the right to any psychological peculiarity by the services he had rendered to the USSR.
Most of them until the late 1930s felt no reason to query the mental condition of their Leader. Doubtless Stalin had previously driven them to distraction with orders to intensify political and economic campaigns. Yet the policies had been those of the ascendant party leadership and the negative side of Stalin’s personality was largely overlooked. Earlier acquaintances had been more perceptive. Fellow pupils in Gori and Tbilisi as well as many party comrades before 1917 had remarked on his hypertrophied sense of importance and his excessive tendency to take offence. And when Lenin used him as Political Commissar in the Civil War or as Party General Secretary, he knew that Stalin would need careful handling if his volatility and crudity were not to damage the interests of the Revolution. Then in the early 1930s Stalin started to demand capital punishment for his adversaries in the communist party. If Nadya’s suicide changed him, it was only to push him down a road he had been travelling his whole life long.
Stalin and his associates aimed to turn the USSR into an industrial and military megalith. They were militants. They wrestled to change society from top to bottom. They fought for ‘cultural revolution’. Their campaign, as they saw it, required the entire syndrome of attitudes and behaviour in the country to be transformed in the spirit of the Enlightenment in general and Marxism in particular. War was waged upon customary ideas. Religion was to be eradicated and nationalist affiliations dissolved. The intelligentsia in the arts and sciences was to be battered into submission or else discarded. The objective was for communism to become the generally accepted ideology and for Stalin’s variant of Marxism–Leninism to be installed as its core. He had not suddenly discovered this inclination. In the 1920s he had urged that young communists be trained to take up positions of authority and spread the party’s ideas.1 The entire generation of Bolshevik veterans shared his standpoint. They believed that the achievement of socialism required a fundamental rupture with the old society and the elites who had formed opinions in it.
