FACING ME, slightly to the left, stood the building that interested me the most — it was an eighteenth-century structure that had served as the Palace of the Senate and later the seat of the government of the USSR. Erected on a triangular plan, it stood inside the Kremlin itself. Lenin, Stalin, and Brezhnev had each ruled from here. They were shielded from the rest of the city and from the country by, as it were, a double guard: first, they were isolated by the enormous emptiness of the broad squares and open, bare spaces surrounding the rise upon which the Kremlin stands, and second — within the fortress — were sheltered by the powerful Kremlin brick wall and the other buildings standing nearby.
That was not enough!
In 1920, H. G. Wells, while visiting Lenin in the Kremlin, noticed a third barrier sheltering the leaders:
The Kremlin as I rememebered it in 1914 was a very open place, open much as Windsor Castle is, with a thin trickle of pilgrims and tourists in groups and couples flowing through it. But now it is closed up and difficult of access. There was a great pother with passes and permits before we could get through even the outer gates. And we filtered and inspected through five or six rooms of clerks and sentinels before we got into the presence. (Russia in the Shadows)
But even that was not enough!
Neither the depopulated squares around the Kremlin, nor the walls and gates of the fortress, nor the empty spaces inside the fortress, nor the checkpoints in the buildings and rooms, gave the leaders a feeling of adequate security. So they went below the surface; they burrowed underground:
Before the Second World War, between the Kremlin and the Central Committee building on Nogin Square, as well as certain other buildings in the center of the city, long underground passages were built, so that the members of the government and the higher military commanders could pass from one area in the Kremlin to another without going out into the street.… Admiral Isakov remembers: “We are walking with Stalin along long Kremlin corridors, at their intersections stand sentries and, in accordance with the regulations of the internal security service, with their gaze they meet and follow each passerby, until, in their mind’s eye, they have delivered him into the care of the next sentry. I’d barely had the time to think about this when Stalin said, in a tone of hatred seasoned with bitterness: ‘They protect … But at any moment they will shoot you in the back.’ ” (Roy Medvedev, Let History Judge)
Well, all right — the surface of the globe is secured, inside the Kremlin walls everything is also under control, and no one can dig through underground; but isn’t there still a menace from the air? Yes, they thought of that too. The sky above the Kremlin is tightly controlled. Only in the muddle of perestroika did oversights occur, and when a young German, Rust, suddenly landed, Gorbachev had to punish several generals for the gaps in the aerial security of the Kremlin.
This sheltering of the leadership, despite the fact that in 1920 the entire security system was still childishly lax and makeshift, led Wells to a thought that troubled him:
It is very possible that all this is indispensable for ensuring Lenin’s personal safety, but it also after all renders difficult the maintaining of direct contact between Russia and him, and — what seems even more important, insofar as the effectiveness of governmental action is concerned — contact between him and Russia. For if what reaches Lenin is passed through a filter of some kind, then similarly everything that comes from him must be filtered, and in the course of such machinations serious distortions can occur.
It is possible that the observation about what fatal consequences the overly tight isolation of the Soviet leaders might have for their thinking occurred to Wells when this distinguished Englishman of impeccable manners, who always took morning walks and afternoon tea with milk, was attacked by Lenin with a series of questions:
Our talk was threaded throughout and held together by two — what shall I call them? — motifs. One was from me to him: “What do you think you are making of Russia? What is the state you are trying to create?” The other was from him to me: ‘Why does not the social revolution begin in England? Why do you not work for the social revolution? Why are you not destroying Capitalism and establishing the Communist State?” These motifs interwove, reacted on each other, illuminated each other. The second brought back the first: “But what are you making of the social revolution? Are you making a success of it?” And from that we got back to two again with: “To make it a success the Western world must join in. Why doesn’t it?”
I WALKED in the direction of the Palace of the Senate. At first no one stopped me, and, in fact, I saw no one around. In the silence I could hear the echo of my own footsteps, and so I tried to walk without making any noise. Yes, it was precisely in this building, now standing before me, that Stalin’s apartment was located. It was here that his wife, Nadiezdha Alliluyeva, committed suicide:
Nadiezdha Alliluyeva’s life with Stalin was becoming increasingly difficult. On November 8, 1932, a number of families of bolshevik leaders who were friendly with one another gathered in the Kremlin to celebrate the fifteenth anniversary of the October Revolution. Nadiezdha Alliluyeva was also present, but Stalin was late. When at last he arrived, Nadiezdha took the liberty of making an ironic comment about him. Stalin exploded with rage and answered her with an impertinence. Sometimes he smoked cigarettes instead of a pipe. Wanting to vent his anger on his wife, he suddenly threw the burning cigarette in her face, and it landed in the décolletage of her dress. Nadiezdha pulled out the cigarette and jumped to her feet, but Stalin quickly turned around and walked out. Nadiezdha walked out practically upon his heels. As it turned out, Stalin went to his dacha, and Nadiezdha to their Kremlin apartment. The festivities were ruined, and several hours later something even worse happened.… In the morning Svetlana’s [Stalin’s daughter] nanny, and Stalin’s housekeeper, Caroline Tiel, was the first to see Nadiezdha Alliluyeva lying beside her bed in a pool of blood with a tiny pistol in her hand. (Roy Medvedev, Let History Judge)
From that time on Stalin lived alone, and his entourage consisted almost entirely of men. But after all, one had to have some fun, especially when the long winter nights arrived and snowstorms raged and the wind wailed over the Kremlin’s deserted expanses.
Stalin finished a late dinner by raising a toast in Lenin’s honor:
“Let us drink to Vladimir Ilyich, our leader, our teacher — our everything!”
We rose and solemnly drank in silence, then promptly drunkenly forgot about Lenin. Stalin, however, continued to wear a serious, solemn, and even sullen expression on his face. We left the table, but before we had started to disperse, Stalin walked up to a large, automatic gramophone. He even tried to dance some of his native dances. And he wasn’t devoid of a sense of rhythm. Nevertheless he soon stopped, offering an explanation full of resignation:
“Age has caught up with me and I am already an old man.”
But his friends, or, rather, courtiers, began to reassure him:
“No, no, nonsense. You look terrific. You are holding up amazingly well. That’s right, for your age.…”