Stalin’s intellectual thought was really an amalgam of tendencies, and he expressed himself with individuality within each of them. He had started as an adult by looking at the world through a Marxist prism, but it had been Marxism of the Leninist variant — and he had adjusted this variant, at times distorting it, to his liking. Lenin’s Marxism had been a compound of Marx’s doctrines with other elements including Russian socialist terrorism. Stalin’s treatment of Leninism was similarly selective; and, like Lenin, he was loath to acknowledge that anything but the purest legacy of Marx and Engels informed his Marxism–Leninism. But his ideas on rulership were undoubtedly characterised by ideas of Russian nationhood, empire, international geopolitics and a generous dose of xenophobic pride. At any given time these tendencies were in play in his mind even if it was solely the members of his entourage who glimpsed the range of his sources. He did not systematise them. To have done so would have involved him in revealing how much he had drawn from thinkers other than Marx, Engels and Lenin. In any case he shrank from codifying ideas that he sensed would cramp his freedom of action if ever they were to be set in stone.
Stalin was a thoughtful man and throughout his life tried to make sense of the universe as he found it. He had studied a lot and forgotten little. His learning, though, had led to only a few basic changes in his ideas. Stalin’s mind was an accumulator and regurgitator. He was not an original thinker nor even an outstanding writer. Yet he was an intellectual to the end of his days.
53. AILING DESPOT
Stalin’s medical condition had steadily worsened. The cardiac problems from late 1945 compelled him to spend weeks away from the Kremlin. He could no longer cope with the previous burdens of official duty. Chronic overwork was exacting its toll. Having risen to political supremacy, he could have slackened his routines. But Stalin was a driven man. He thrashed himself as hard as he did his subordinates. He could no more spend a day in indolence than he was able to leap to the moon. Stalin, unlike Hitler, was addicted to administrative detail. He was also ultra-suspicious in his ceaseless search for signs that someone might be trying to dislodge his policies or supplant him as the Leader.
His previous medical history included appendicitis, painful corns, laryngitis and probably psoriasis.1 His chronic mistrust of the medical profession had done him no favours. Admittedly even Stalin could not do entirely without doctors; but Kremlin specialists were nervous when treating him and arrests of individuals accused of poisoning Politburo members and other prominent public figures were frequent. Dr Moshentseva offered a bizarre and rather implausible account. When Stalin was brought to the clinic for treatment for an ‘enormous abscess’ on his foot, his face and body were reportedly covered in a blanket and she was instructed to fold back only the bottom edge. Not until later did she discover the identity of her patient.2 Less fortunate was Stalin’s personal physician Vladimir Vinogradov. In January 1952, after giving the Leader a check-up, he advised him to retire from politics to prevent fatal damage to his health. Vinogradov’s frank diagnosis angered Stalin, who could not become a pensioner without risking retaliation by whoever became his successor. The diagnosis of permanent debility might induce his subordinates to gang up on him. (He had certainly given them excuse.) Vinogradov was thrown into the Lubyanka in November. The medical care of the Leader could come at a high price for his doctors.3
Stalin did not disregard his health problems. From the mid-1920s he had taken lengthy summer vacations by the Black Sea, relying on letters and telegrams to keep contact with politics in the Kremlin. Even when on holiday, he went on giving general instructions to his highest subordinates. The vacations got longer after 1945. In 1949 he spent three months in his residences in the south; in both 1950 and 1951 his sojourns in Abkhazia lasted nearly five months.4
He was trying to prolong life and career by mixing Black Sea leisure with long-distance rule. In 1936 he had had a dacha built for himself at Kholodnaya Rechka north of Gagra on the Abkhazian coast. It was a thick-walled stone structure designed by his court architect Miron Merzhanov. It had a dining room, meeting room, billiard room, tea room and several bedrooms — both upstairs and downstairs — and bathrooms. (In fact Stalin went on sleeping on a divan in preference to his many beds.)5 The emphasis was on Soviet stolidity rather than luxury. The only imports were the German shower fittings and the Italian billiard table. Although the carpets were of better quality than any obtainable in Soviet shops, they were poorer than those sold in the Tbilisi markets of his boyhood. He ordered wood panelling throughout the dacha, and the walls of each room were covered with a variety of varnished timber. Apart from the billiard room, Stalin’s main self-indulgence was a long gallery with a film projector and a screen foldable out from the wall. Water was pumped up from the stream at the bottom of the valley immediately to the south. The dacha’s external walls (and this was also true of his daughter’s adjacent dacha) were painted camouflage green.6
Slow on his feet, by the early 1950s Stalin looked like a gargoyle which had dropped off the guttering of a medieval church. His face had a gloomy pallor. His hair had long ago turned the grey of weather-beaten sandstone. No longer holding receptions for distinguished foreign guests, he ceased again to bother about his appearance. His clothes were shabbier than ever. Stalin lived as he pleased. Fir trees masked the buildings from view. Whenever he was in residence, fifteen hundred guards maintained his privacy and security. He alone slept in the residential part of the dacha,7 and he habitually left the choice of bedroom till the last moment for fear of being assassinated.
Stalin liked working in the afternoon and at night; nothing would change in his routine until he finally collapsed in 1953. He never learned to swim and seldom descended the 826 steps to the road by the coast. His place of pleasure was the garden. At Kholodnaya Rechka he could distract himself from the political concerns that bothered his waking hours. From the balcony at the garden’s edge he could gaze at the Black Sea, calm and almost waveless in the late summer months. Fancying himself as a gardener, he planted lemon and eucalyptus trees in front of the house. The lemon tree was the only plant to survive the bitter winter of 1947–8; it remains there to this day.8 In his Abkhazian dachas he could make his political calculations without fuss. He could also enjoy the kind of Caucasus he wanted for himself. This was a Caucasus without the bright human diversity and hectic activity of the towns of Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan or Abkhazia. At Kholodnaya Rechka or up by Lake Ritsa there was nothing but the dachas, the mountains, the sky and the sea. This was a controlled, secluded Caucasus where the only intrusions were those which he told Poskrëbyshev and Vlasik to allow.
Whether restoring himself in the south or relaxing at Blizhnyaya, Stalin strove to keep his decline a secret. He weighed himself regularly. He swallowed pills and iodine capsules — without medical supervision — to perk himself up.9 He took the waters at the Black Sea spas and enjoyed occasional saunas in Moscow (which he regarded as equivalent to physical exercise: he had long given up active recreations). Stalin made it a point of pride on ceremonial occasions to ascend the Mausoleum steps on Red Square briskly before waving to the crowd.10 Soviet citizens were encouraged to believe that the country’s ruler remained hale and hearty. Stalin himself poked fun at those in his entourage who had let themselves go physically. He baited Khrushchëv and Malenkov for their corpulence. He ridiculed others on grounds of taste. Bulganin’s goatee beard amused him. He laughed at Beria for refusing to wear a tie even though he himself would never wear one; he also objected to Beria’s pince-nez: ‘It makes you look like a Menshevik. Only a little chain is needed to complete the picture!’11