Sporadic attempts to ‘humanise’ his image occurred. The most notable were the memoirs produced by the surviving Alliluevs. Anna Allilueva and her father Sergei, proud of their family’s past, recorded their impressions of Stalin before the October Revolution. These were published in 1946.17 Sergei’s book appeared posthumously: he had died, worn out by years of toil and worry and family tragedy, the previous July. Anna was alert to the risks of writing about Stalin and made a formal approach to Malenkov to assure herself that the book would have Stalin’s blessing.18 The texts were eulogistic and had gone through the censorship.19 But Sergei let slip that he had known Stalin as Soso Dzhughashvili. He also mentioned that Stalin’s first attempt to escape administrative exile in Novaya Uda in the winter of 1903–4 was marred by an elementary error: Stalin forgot to take warm clothing with him and his face and ears were severely frozen.20 Anna’s memoir gave still more details about the private life of Stalin. She described how his damaged arm precluded him from being called up in the First World War. She related that he looked thinner and older after the February 1917 Revolution and that, when he came to live with the Alliluevs, he liked to tease the family maid. The memoir reported that Stalin slept in the same room as Sergei in late summer. It also described his approval of Nadya Allilueva’s zeal in tidying up the apartment. And it gave a comical account of Stalin’s fondness for his pipe: Anna recalled that he had fallen asleep with it lit and burned the sheets.21
Stalin soon regretted having sanctioned the Alliluev books. Anna was arrested in 1948 and sentenced to the camps for ten years for defaming him. He ignored her letter to him that she had cleared the project before publication and that she had done nothing wrong.22 She could hardly believe what was happening. She wrote to him defending her family and its record. Implicitly she accused ‘dear Joseph’ of ingratitude: ‘But there are people who our family simply saved from death. And this isn’t overpraise but the very truth, which it is very easy to prove.’23 That she could send such a message to the Leader is a sign of her courage or stupidity. Enough of Stalin’s in-laws had perished before the Second World War for her to have known the kind of person she was addressing.
Although the widowed Olga Allilueva, to whom Stalin had expressed fond gratitude in 1915, was not persecuted, she became severely depressed. Nadya had killed herself in 1932, Pavel had died in 1938 and Fëdor had never recovered from the mental trauma of the trick played upon him by Kamo at the end of the Civil War. None of Olga’s children or children-in-law remained at liberty in the post-war years. Pavel’s widow Yevgenia did not save herself by marrying again and leaving the vicinity of Stalin: she had been arrested a year earlier than Anna and received the same punishment. Olga was inconsolable: she died a broken old woman in 1951. This was how Stalin rewarded the Alliluevs for the favours they had rendered him before the October Revolution. His Svanidze in-laws had already received his special expression of thanks. Alexander Svanidze had been arrested in the Great Terror and shot in 1942; his wife Maria had had a heart attack on receiving the news. Not only they but also the two sisters of Stalin’s first wife Ketevan — Maria and Alexandra — had perished before the end of the Second World War. The only close relatives who lived without fear of arrest were his children Svetlana and Vasili. They were the exceptions: the pattern was that a family connection with Stalin brought about repression.
The problem presented by the Alliluevs was that they knew him so well. He wished to float free of his personal history. Increasingly he opted for the status of state icon at the expense of a realistic image of himself. He became ever more detached and mysterious. It is true that he sometimes appeared on the Lenin Mausoleum to review the October Revolution or the May Day parades. But few spectators got more than a fleeting glimpse of him. Usually the police and the parade marshals hurried everyone across Red Square as fast as possible.24
What people lacked in direct experience of Stalin, they often made up for in expressions of devotion to him. The universal genius of the father of all the peoples had to be acknowledged on every solemn occasion in schools, enterprises and offices. Gratitude for his life and career had to be manifested. Pravda quoted daily from his works. His photographs, old ones retouched for the current day, were regularly published — and sometimes paintings were brought out of store and turned into images looking like photographs. None of this damaged his standing since so few individuals actually met him: he had become a distant deity. Meetings started always with a paean to the Leader. Memory of a past when he had not been ruler was confined to a small minority of Soviet society. There was nothing in the USSR or in the other countries where communism was established which was deemed untouched by his genius. Images of him were hung on walls at work and in the home. His biography was conventionally given to youngsters on important occasions. Short of being called God on earth, Stalin had deified himself.
In 1949 when he (inaccurately) celebrated his seventieth birthday,25 a tremendous fuss was made of him. He made a limp attempt to stop it getting out of hand, telling Malenkov: ‘Don’t even think of presenting me with another star!’ By this he meant he had had enough awards (and he continued to regret allowing himself to be called Generalissimus: when Churchill asked him what to call him, Marshal or Generalissimus, Stalin answered Marshal).26 There was no chance that Malenkov would take this display of humility seriously. Laudatory books of memoirs were prepared for the great day. Articles proliferated in newspapers. On the day itself, 21 December, a vast balloon was sent up over the Kremlin and the image of Stalin’s moustachioed face was projected on to it. Processions in his honour had been organised the length and breadth of the USSR. The festival continued into the evening at the Bolshoi Theatre when guests from the Soviet political elite and from abroad assembled to do honour to the Leader. It was one of Stalin’s rare appearances and those who saw him were surprised at how physically diminished he seemed: they had been fed pictures from the cult and were unprepared for the human reality. Could it really be that the wizened old man before their gaze was the Great Stalin?
Yet they adjusted themselves to what they had seen. They reverted to admiration. Stalin might be elderly but he remained in their eyes the towering figure in the history of the USSR since the late 1920s. His had been the campaign to modernise, industrialise and educate in the 1930s, and — they thought — he had succeeded. His had been the leadership that had brought victory over the Nazi hordes. His was the firm hand at the helm of foreign policy in the storms of the Cold War. If the audience had doubts about his greatness, they quickly dispelled them. Hours of speeches reinforced the message that the world’s finest politician alive was present in the hall. Leader after leader extolled his significance for communism. The stage, decorated with banners and flowers, was occupied by foreign communist luminaries such as Mao Tse-tung, Palmiro Togliatti and Dolores Ibárruri (who had been in Moscow exile since the Spanish Civil War). Behind them was spread an enormous portrait of Stalin. He himself smiled occasionally and clapped the orators. Although he was hardly expansive in his gestures, he was a contented man. The entire communist movement was rendering him homage.
The cult of Stalin, lord of all he surveyed, spread far beyond Soviet borders. On posters and in the press his image was prominent, and failure by communist leaderships in eastern Europe to maintain public reverence was inconceivable. This attitude was internalised by individual leaders from the region whenever they had direct contact with him. Conversations with Stalin were treated as if subjects were being admitted to audiences with an emperor. The Hungarian Prime Minister, Ferenc Nagy, gushed at the outset of their exchanges: ‘The Hungarian government has recognised that a year after the [country’s] liberation it must come to Generalissimus Stalin to express its gratitude for Hungary’s liberation, for the freedom of Hungarian political life and for the independence of the Hungarian motherland.’27 Nagy was not alone. Polish Prime Minister Bolesław Bierut declared: ‘We have come to you, comrade Stalin, as to our great friend so as to express our considerations on the course of events in Poland and check the correctness of our evaluation of the political situation in the country.’28 Stalin was usually pleased by this abject submission to his will. But occasionally the reports did not please him, and when he reprimanded the Romanian communist leader Georgiu-Dej for mistaken policies, there was nothing for it but for Dej to ‘confess the erroneousness of his views’.29