Stalin: A Biography полностью

There was an exception to his seclusion. Sister-in-law Maria Svanidze jotted down an account in her diary of an incident on his daughter’s birthday in November 1935. Svetlana wanted to take a ride on the new Moscow Metro and Maria was set to accompany her and her brother Vasili. At the last minute Stalin said he would join them together with Molotov. Kaganovich was flummoxed. Although he had ordered ten tickets in advance, he was alarmed by the security implications of the news that Stalin was going to be involved. When they arrived at Crimea Square, the walls of the newly opened Metro station had not yet dried out but normal passengers were already using it. Bystanders spotted Stalin while arrangements were being made for him and his companions to travel in a separate carriage with its own engine, and when they got out at Okhotny Ryad, the station nearest to the Kremlin, there were ovations from fellow passengers. Resuming their places in the carriage, they travelled onward on the Ring Line until Stalin decided it was time to return home.²⁶

Such an excursion might have been undertaken by Nicholas II if he had still been on the throne. But usually Stalin’s behaviour contrasted with his practice. He gave speeches and wrote articles on Soviet and world politics whereas the Romanovs left it to their bishops to give sermons: tsars did not characteristically write conspectuses of their intentions. Nicholas II was a Christian believer; he felt no need as a ruler to explain his faith to those outside his family. Stalin was of a different mould. He spent much time in the 1920s and 1930s working on manuscripts. It was hard, unremitting work. He dispensed with the services of shorthand typists: he thought they fidgeted too much. He wrote laboriously in his own hand rather than suffer distraction. No emperor since Catherine the Great had such a zest for writing — and Empress Catherine had written mainly to confidential correspondents such as Voltaire and Diderot: Stalin composed his literary stuff for the world. The Romanovs were by and large considerate to their ministers. Stalin enjoyed humiliating his subordinates; he traumatised and killed many of them. He was seldom courteous and never unmenacing. (Often when he turned on the charm, he made them wonder what devilishness he was preparing.) He scared his entourage witless. Not since Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great had there been a Russian ruler who set out to have this effect.

A further point of difference between Stalin and the tsars in their styles of rulership was of a social nature. Repeatedly, he insisted at private gatherings that his political success was attributable to the support of ‘the masses’:²⁷

Tsars did not talk this way. Indeed in June 1937 Stalin went further. Being used to toasting the health of People’s Commissars, he wanted respect to be given to ‘the tens of thousands’ of small and medium leaders: ‘They’re modest people. They don’t push themselves forward and are barely discernible. But it would be blindness not to notice them.’²⁸

He gave sharp expression to this attitude on 7 November 1937 at the October Revolution anniversary dinner, where he delivered a speech unrecorded in the press. The praktiki, he declared, were the intermediaries who maintained the link between the Kremlin and the masses. His rivals in the Soviet leadership in the 1920s had been more popular; but they overlooked the need to nurture the careers of functionaries in the lower ranks. When Dimitrov and others tried to praise him personally, he countered with a eulogy of the praktiki.²⁹ His belief was that the defeat of the internal party oppositions, followed by the purges of recent months, had got rid of those leaders from higher echelons in pre-revolutionary society. He had said this in June 1937 to military commanders after the arrest and execution of Tukhachevski.³⁰ Stalin was eager to prove that he and his surviving associates were better able than the privileged former émigrés to understand the needs of the working class and the peasantry. They themselves were from the lower depths — or at least many of them were. No Romanov emperor boasted of having no genealogical excellence.