Stalin: A Biography полностью

Yet there was a moment in the Moscow Metro episode when minds turned back to the Imperial epoch. At Okhotny Ryad station Stalin’s group left the train to try out the escalator. Meanwhile the passengers on the platform thrust forward into his carriage and stayed when Stalin returned and the train moved on:³¹

This remark does not seem to refer exclusively to the Russians;³² probably Stalin had all the masses of the former Russian Empire in mind when he said it. Nevertheless he had revealed something important about his understanding of rulership in the USSR. To Stalin’s eyes, the mentality of most Soviet citizens not yet been transformed by the October Revolution. They needed to be ruled, at least to some extent, in a traditional way. And this meant they needed a ‘tsar’.

Stalin was an avid reader of books about Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great. He admired their forceful methods and condoned brutality in pursuit of the interests of the state. Evidently some tsars were more congenial as models than others. Even Ivan the Terrible fell short of being the apple of his eye. For Stalin, Ivan was too unsystematic in repressing his enemies. More generally, though, he adopted certain techniques of rulership from the tsars. Most Romanov rulers maintained an aura of mystery. Too much exposure to public view might have derogated from the dignity and authority of the Imperial throne. Stalin adhered to this tradition. Possibly he did this because he knew he did not sound entirely Russian. In fact there were Romanov emperors who had had the same problem: Catherine the Great was a German princess of the houses of Anhalt and Holstein. In Stalin’s case the difficulty was made greater by the fact that he, a Georgian ruling Russia, had an entourage with many who were also not Russians. Stalin, furthermore, had modified his political style. No longer did he have open office hours when ordinary party militants could come and consult him. He did not have his photograph taken with provincial delegations at Party Congresses; he did not submit his ideas to discussion on public occasions.

Just a few traces of his ‘common touch’ persisted. Despite his enormous workload, Stalin still found time to pen personal notes to individuals who wrote to him about all manner of small matters. When the peasant woman Fekla Korshunova, aged seventy, sent a letter asking permission to present him with one of her four cows, he replied:³³

This little response is a feather in the scale of his virtues; it is massively outweighed by the scale holding the records of his murderous misanthropy. But it shows that even in the terror years he was capable of kindness to strangers.