This Charming Man

Glimpses of Joseph Stalin From Simon Sebag Montefiore's Biography

Joseph Stalin enjoying a lighter moment with one of his close associates, Andrei Zhdanov. Photographer unknown. Tate.

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This Charming Man: Glimpses of Stalin

The greatest delight is to mark one’s enemy, prepare everything, avenge oneself thoroughly and then go to sleep.
Joseph Stalin

“Oh what a wonderful time it was,” wrote the wife of a Politburo member about the early 1930s. The Kremlin was a little village, akin to a campus, where the Stalin and his lieutenants lived, worked and conspired. Hardened by revolution and civil war, the communists brimmed with purpose. Commanding vast industries and brutalising the citizenry, they were certain they doing the hard but necessary work of making the revolution secure. The Politburo members and their families would drop into each other’s houses, drink and dine together, maybe watch a movie. Their children played together in the courtyards. Stalin and his then wife were very much part of this cosy scene. He was a teasing, avuncular presence to the children, ruffling hair, hoisting them onto his shoulders.

By the end of the 1920s Stalin had seen off Trotsky and other rivals to become first among equals, although he didn’t achieve absolute, Tsar-like authority for a few more years. In the 1930s he led the Great Turn leftwards: solving the problem of the peasants, those barriers to modernisation, by herding them into collective farms. The simplest solution, from Stalin’s point of view, was to kill them - by starving or shooting. Millions were disposed of in this way. The further that the communist leaders waded into death, the stronger Stalin became, and the more feared, including by those who once considered him a peer or intimate. Later in the decade, Stalin unleashed the Great Terror - his sadistic, murderous, comprehensive purge of the Party, military, intelligentsia and bourgeoisie - and did not spare his closest comrades.

Before he was feared, he was liked. As Simon Sebag Montefiore put it in Stalin: The Court of The Red Tsar (2003), “The foundation of Stalin’s power in the Party was not fear; it was charm.” I’d imagined Stalin to be a dull, bureaucratic grinder who worked his way to the top by methodically accumulating power in increments. That is how he’s often spoken about, perhaps to draw a contrast with Hitler, or to give people another chance to wheel out that Hannah Arendt quote. But one of the many things I discovered from Sebag Montefiore’s absolutely captivating book is that this isn’t true.

Stalin was not banal; he was brilliant. Everyone, including his enemies, attested to his charisma and intelligence. Despite his pockmarks, he was darkly handsome, with feline eyes that seemed to penetrate your skull. His movements were ‘supple and graceful’. In meetings, he was quick-minded and incisive, and possessed of an extraordinary capacity for absorbing and remembering information; he “dominated his entourage with his intelligence”. Throughout his life he was intellectually hungry, eager to learn about science and technology and ideas. When world war broke out he quickly went from being an ignoramus about geopolitical and military strategy to someone who could more than hold his own with Roosevelt and Churchill.

He was emotionally intelligent, too. He read the faces of whoever was around him, discerning their feelings and thoughts. He could tease affectionately and offer sincere compliments. He had hinterland: he loved music and read voraciously in history and literature, amassing a vast library. He read new novels as well as classics. He had great respect for Russia’s writers, filmmakers, composers (up to a point) and took a terrifyingly close interest in Moscow’s cultural scene. He could be affectionate, and not just to his daughter, on whom he doted, but to his senior leaders - he was always asking after their health, recommending they get some sleep or take a holiday if he thought they were working too hard. He was a genuinely caring boss! Until he decided to have you tortured and killed.

At social occasions, he was roguish, mocking, self-ironising. He had a pronounced and sharp sense of humour, albeit in a darkly sardonic register. Whether or not you found his jokes funny probably depended on how scared you were.

A small example. The invasion of Finland in 1939 was incompetently executed and unexpectedly costly (presaging Ukraine, 2022). As Stalin well knew, one reason for the Red Army’s incompetence was that so many of its best officers had been killed in his purges. That didn’t stop him bearing down on his commanders at a subsequent Supreme Military Council. When one of them admitted to being surprised to come across forests in Finland, Stalin said: ‘It’s time our army knew there were forests there…in Peter’s time there were forests. Elizabeth…Catherine…Alexander found forests! And now! That’s four times! (Laughter).’” Nervous laughter, no doubt.

Stalin was quite a phrasemaker. He knew how to write a good speech or public statement, how to cut through the bureaucratese of his officials and say big things simply. He called writers “engineers of human souls”, which indicates both his respect for literature and his instrumental view of it. In conversation, he was adroit. The famous quote, “How many divisions has the Pope?” is authentic. He asked it at Yalta, after Churchill suggested getting the Pope onside. It was typical of Stalin’s mordant, scouring wit.

He had remarkable stamina. He would work all night then catch a few hours sleep before starting again. He didn’t like beds. When the time came to sleep he would just lie down on the nearest divan. This was perhaps because he got used to sleeping rough as a young revolutionary, and perhaps because he felt vulnerable in a bed. He was relentlessly paranoid. He believed pretty much everyone was conspiring against the government, and against him, all the time.

If you were a close comrade of Stalin and you loved your wife, you feared for her. He oversaw the arrest, exile and murder of several of his closest associates’ wives. Stalin had what Sebag Montefiore calls a “burning suspicion of uxuriousness”. This was related to the fact that his two wives were dead, the second by suicide. It was also because he distrusted any personal bond which might rival loyalty to Party, which was loyalty to him.

Stalin was a keen gardener, a cultivator of roses, pruner of bushes. He liked to take his entourage on a tour of his gardens. In one scene in the book, he picks up a rake and starts weeding, commanding the others to do the same. Beria, his chief consigliere and henchman at the time, seizes an axe. “I’m just demonstrating to the master of the garden, Joseph Vissarinovich, that I can chop down any tree.” Beria’s comrades would not have been unaware of the double entendre: no tree, save one, was too big to be chopped down.

Stalin savoured his power over the bodies of his comrades. He would silently note some slight, some offence, some imaginary evidence of disloyalty - perhaps from an associate or an associate’s wife - and store it, sometimes for years, before ordering punishment. Everyone denounced everyone else to him, and he loved poring through their submissions, believing every word, considering when and how to strike. People often came to see him trembling with fear because they thought they were in trouble. He enjoyed reassuring them, and would send them away weeping with gratitude. Then he would give the order.

In 1941, Stalin didn’t see Hitler’s attack on Russia coming. He knew the Red Army wasn’t nearly ready to fight the Nazis, so he made himself believe that it wasn’t happening, even as Hitler moved his troops further and deeper into eastern Europe. Stalin’s generals implored him to let them prepare, but he didn’t want to do anything that might ‘provoke’ Hitler. Spies told him the date that Germany’s invasion was planned to begin (June 22); he ignored them. German deserters and escaped Russian prisoners of war also tipped Russia off; he had them shot. Churchill sent a letter warning him; Stalin assumed Britain was trying to entrap the Soviet Union.

He gave orders that absolutely nothing should be done that might upset Hitler. For instance, it was not acceptable to call the Nazis ‘fascists’ in public. This extreme caution extended even to novels. In the midst of the German build-up, Stalin took the time to telephone a Jewish writer, Ilya Ehrenburg, who had written a novel that the censors had refused for being anti-German. Stalin told Ehrenburg he liked the book, and after suggesting he be careful about pronouncing on Fascism, told him he would push it through.

The episode is significant not so much because of the book itself but because it shows, first, how deeply engaged Stalin was with literature - he really did read novels, even the ones he banned - and also how deluded he was about Germany. Nobody but Stalin would have imagined that Hitler might be triggered to invade Russia because of the nuances in a work of literary fiction.

On June 22, 1941, at approximately 3.15am, 3.8 million Axis troops invaded the Western Soviet Union. The Luftwaffe began dropping bombs on Russian cities. Nobody around Stalin wanted to be the one to break the news. His most senior lieutenants panicked and fought among themselves:

’Should I or shouldn’t I tell Stalin?
‘Inform him immediately!’
‘You call him. I’m afraid.’
‘No, you call him.’

General Zhukov - Stalin’s most competent remaining general - called Stalin’s dacha, to be told he was sleeping. Finally, Stalin was roused and came to the phone. Zhukov reported and asked for permission to counter-attack. On the other end of the line: silence. All Zhukov could hear was heavy breathing. ‘Did you understand me?,’ he asked, ‘Comrade Stalin…?”

Stalin eventually responded and called a meeting of the Politburo in Moscow, at which he was subdued and bewildered. When he spoke, he proposed that German army might have acted unilaterally and that Hitler didn’t know about it. It took Molotov, one of his oldest comrades, to insist on the obvious - that this was war. Over the next few days, Stalin grasped the seriousness of the situation, and recovered some of his will to lead. But he was still not in a good way.

On June 28, Minsk fell to the Germans, opening up the road to Moscow. After an angry and despairing meeting between General Zhukov and the Politburo magnates at which this news was digested, Stalin led his courtiers out of the office. As they climbed into waiting cars he said, ‘Everything’s lost. I give up. Lenin founded our state and we’ve fucked it up.’ There are multiple first-hand accounts of this moment, all consistent, bar minor variations of wording. I’ll give you a couple of the variations cited by Sebag Montefiore just because they sound so much like takes from an Armando Iannucci scene:

’Lenin left us a great heritage and we his successors have shitted it up.’
’Lenin left us a proletarian state and now we’ve been caught with our pants down and let the whole thing go to shit.’¹

The next day, Stalin did not come into the Kremlin. Everyone wondered where he was and what he was doing. He seems to have had a nervous breakdown, or at least a collapse in self-confidence. He shut himself away in his dacha and refused to take calls. But nobody dared take any decisions in his absence, just in case it was a test of loyalty. The result was that as the Germans advanced at speed into Russia, the Soviet Union was paralysed for two days.

Beria, Molotov and the other leaders found the courage to go and see Stalin at his dacha, with a plan. They proposed a war cabinet, headed by Stalin. He received them in his dining room, looking, haggard, gloomy, and nervous. Searching the faces of his courtiers, he asked, ‘Why’ve you come?’ Beria later said that he thought Stalin was expecting the worst. But these lieutenants were still terrified of Stalin - scared that he would spring back into life and destroy any one of them at will.

Even if they had wanted to get rid of him, none of them trusted each other enough to co-operate. In truth, only he could rule. When it became clear that they genuinely wanted him to lead, Stalin reanimated, and from that moment on led the war effort with unrelenting energy and inhuman brutality. At an unimaginably immense cost in human lives, Russia pushed Germany back.²

How did Stalin make such a blunder? When it came to relations with other countries, he was - usually - a more rational and strategic thinker than Hitler, which made it hard for him to imagine why Hitler would want to open up a second front. But Hitler was a reckless gambler, a mad visionary, who believed it was his destiny to lead Germany’s colonisation of the east. After the war, Stalin made an oblique reference to his mistake: “When you’re trying to make a decision, NEVER put yourself into the mind of the other person because if you do, you can make a terrible mistake.” He meant, I think, that it’s a mistake to put yourself into another’s mind while assuming that their mind works more or less the same as yours. True. (Don’t worry, I’m not going to do ‘leadership lessons from Stalin’.)

After it was clear that the Germans would be defeated, Stalin became swaggeringly arrogant. He liked to show off his absolute power to the leaders of democracies. At dinner in Moscow with Churchill, Roosevelt and De Gaulle, he made champagne toasts to one after the other of his senior colleagues in a grotesque comedy routine.

“To Kaganovich!” (an old Bolshevik stalwart and comrade responsible for the train system). “Come here!” (Kaganovich rises, goes to clink glasses.) “A brave man! He knows that if the trains do not arrive on time,” (pauses), “We shall shoot him!”. Next, Stalin toasted Air Force Commander Novikov, this “good Marshal, let’s drink to him. And if he doesn’t do his job properly…we’ll hang him!” Novikov would shortly be arrested and tortured.

‘His last years were the most dangerous,” said Molotov, one of the lucky comrades who survived him. “He swung to extremes.” After the war, the aged Stalin became more impulsive, capricious, and unpredictable. His terrible error long behind him, he was regarded, and regarded himself, as the great saviour of the nation, utterly infallible. He didn’t spend much time on actually running the country but still kept a tight grip on power, more paranoid, vindictive and cruel than ever. Having been only mildly anti-Semitic by Russian standards, he now instigated a vicious purge of Jews from the Party and military.

Stalin trod the corridors of his Kremlin residence surrounded by a phalanx of guards in uniform. Plain-clothes guards walked 25 steps in front and two metres behind. Any official who happened to see him approaching had to stand against the wall and show their hands. One nervous young diplomat recalled catching the eye of the leader. Stalin “did not fail to notice my confusion’ and asked “who I was and where I worked”. The leader, stressing his words by waving a finger slowly in front of the young man’s face, declared, “Youth must not fear Comrade Stalin. He is its friend.” Not terrifying at all!

Though physically and mentally weakened, Stalin’s will to dominate remained. He slept late but liked to work through the night and made sure others did too. He would invite senior leaders and foreign guests to his residence in the evening and make them watch a film in his cinema. He liked gangster films - he loved fights - and Westerns (he liked John Ford). He admired Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy. He hated any hint of sexuality. He might insist on two movies in a row, then at around 2am, he’d suggest (‘suggest’) they all get something to eat.

These nocturnal dinners would go on until dawn, Stalin insisting everyone keep eating and drinking (his lieutenants had to deploy all kinds of strategies to stop themselves getting obese or dying from alcohol poisoning, which at least one succumbed to). Beria relished making sure that nobody evaded boozing. The Politburo leaders, who were actually running the country by day, and hated these sessions, often had to stagger out to vomit. Mikoyan started taking secret naps in the bathroom until Beria found out and told Stalin, who was furious. The dinner conversation meandered, from literature to politics, but it was also here, in this crucible of derangement, that decisions about the country, affecting millions of people, were taken.

Stalin himself tended to drink very little, but sometimes he would join in and start a food fight. Beria strove to amuse his boss. He placed a tomato on the seat of a magnate and watching them sit on it. He poured salt into another’s vodka to make them choke. He slipped tomatoes into Mikoyan’s suit, then pressed him against the wall so that they exploded in the pockets. He wrote ‘PRICK’ on a piece of paper and stuck it on Khrushchev’s back.

After dinner Stalin would put on a gramophone record and urge the grandees to dance. Sometimes he would join in, shuffling around in Georgian style, arms akimbo. The group might then gather around the piano to sing folk songs and hymns. As dawn arrived, Stalin would get increasingly irritable, exploding in anger. “You’ve all got old. I’ll replace you all!” At around 5am he would dismiss his exhausted, paralytic courtiers, who had to be virtually dragged into their cars by their chauffeurs. Stalin would lie down on a divan, pick up a book, and read until he fell asleep.

If you enjoyed this, please share and ‘like’; failure to do so will be noted as evidence of disloyalty to The Ruffian. After the jump: a Rattle Bag of juicy links including my thoughts on the late Brian Wilson. Paid subscribers get the best of the Ruffian, including the Rattle Bag, articles in full, and reader comments (some fascinating comments on last week’s piece about AI and jobs). Ps I’m getting a notification saying I’ve exceeded email length so you might want to read online - click on the title at the top.