By design, the Soviet regime lacked a central clearinghouse for assembling and analyzing the voluminous espionage reports that its agents generated. The defense commissariat had a directorate for intelligence, known in Russian as the RU but here spelled out as “military intelligence,” and the NKVD (and then the NKGB) had its own foreign intelligence directorate, while most foreign correspondents of TASS, the Soviet press agency, engaged in espionage, and the Comintern, too, ran a spy network. Only Stalin knew what was produced by all the parallel intelligence networks.
Stalin’s entrance to Catherine the Great’s triangular Imperial Senate.
Inner sanctum: Stalin’s Kremlin office (the “Little Corner”), a photo taken by James Abbé, April 13, 1932, to counteract rumors of the dictator’s ill health spread by foreign intelligence services.
Happy times (left to right): Kirov, Kaganovich, Orjonikidze, Stalin, and Mikoyan on the Kremlin grounds in 1932 at the height of the Soviet famine.
In search of food: starvation in the Kazakh autonomous republic (Pavlodar province).
Nadya Alliluyeva, Stalin’s second wife, November 1932. From the photo album of her father, Sergei (which would be confiscated after his arrest and placed in Stalin’s archive).
Stalin and Co.: Lavrenti Beria holds Svetlana; Nestor Lakoba wears a bulky hearing aid. This is the first southern holiday without Nadya. Sochi, 1933.
Vasily and his widowed father with Nikolai Vlasik, bodyguard and photographer. Evidently Svetlana took this photo. Sochi, summer 1933.
Svetlana, Sergei Kirov, and Stalin. Sochi, summer 1934.
The 17th Party Congress—“Congress of Victors”—in the newly combined Andreyev-Alexandrov hall. Grand Kremlin Palace, January–February 1934.
Boris Pasternak (left) and the painter Pavel Malkov, First Congress of the Union of Soviet Writers, August 29, 1934.
The Writers’ Congress keynote speech was given by Maxim Gorky, whom Stalin had coaxed back from exile and pampered. Gorky helped the dictator conscript the artistic intelligentsia into state service.
Seducing the European cultural set: Nobel Laureate Romain Rolland (to Stalin’s right) and Maria Kudryashova, Rolland’s wife-translator; Stalin; and Soviet cultural minder Alexander Arosyev. Little Corner, June 28, 1935.
Stalin’s cultural dilemmas: Demyan Bedny, a celebrated but mediocre proletarian poet loyal to the cause.
Mikhail Bulgakov, a suspected White Guardist, but supremely talented.
Mass entertainment: Grigory Alexandrov (center), acclaimed director of the hit musicals
Leonid Utyosov (left) and his phenomenally popular jazz band.
Dmitri Shostakovich, composer. Stalin’s tastes in classical music ran to the traditional, which caught out Shostakovich, but more so-called former people (of the old regime) survived in music than in any other artistic pursuit, partly because of Stalin’s indulgence.
Ivan Kozlovsky, lyric tenor, one of Stalin’s favorites, 1933.
Fallen friend: Kirov’s bier, flanked by Stalin and Kaganovich. Moscow, December 4, 1934.
Leonid Nikolayev, terrorist.
Filipp Medved, helping to supervise construction of the White Sea–Baltic canal, a Gulag project, after which he was posted to the Leningrad NKVD, making him responsible for Kirov’s security.
Candid images were not permitted for public reproduction: including Stalin in profile, his Georgian features manifest, Second all-Union Congress of Collective Farm Shock Workers, February, 1935.
Three marshals (left to right): Yegorov, Voroshilov, and Tukhachevsky, with Stalin and Lakoba (far right) on holiday. Abkhazia, mid-1930s.
Vasily, Yakov, and Svetlana, with Stalin’s mother, an ill Keke Geladze, on her metal bed. Tiflis, June 1935.
The first meeting with a high Western official: Anthony Eden (left foreground), accompanied by British ambassador Viscount Chilston (right), all looking toward the British photographer. (Background) Ivan Maisky, Soviet ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, is to the left of Molotov. Molotov’s office, March 29, 1935.
A new Stalin favorite: Moscow party boss Nikita Khrushchev (in front of Stalin and in summer whites with a white worker’s cap), flanked by Yagoda (left) and Andrei Andreyev (center, with black cap), on the Lenin Mausoleum, July 10, 1935.
Stalin and his indispensable servitors: Molotov and Alexander Poskryobyshev (center), head of the secret department, January 1936.
Molotov presiding over the Council of People’s Commissars, the cabinet-style government, on the third floor of the Imperial Senate, in front of the door to the deceased Lenin’s preserved office.
Man of the imperial borderlands, with Lazar Kaganovich (tucking his ear). Stalin celebrated the Russian nation’s civilizing mission, ending Lenin’s warnings about great Russian chauvinism. Kremlin reception for collective farmers from Tajikistan and Turkmenistan. Imperial Senate, December 4, 1935.
