Molotov was still living close to Stalin in a Kremlin apartment when Trotsky was forced into exile. He was busy that year purging the Moscow City administration of ‘right deviationists’ and organising the forcible requisitioning of grain from peasants in the Ukraine. Decades later, at the end of his life, Molotov’s family occupied both apartments on the third floor of this house, 61 and 62 on the other side of the staircase, Trotsky’s last refuge in Russia. Molotov still enjoyed recalling the humiliation on the landing of his longtime adversary, the ‘rightist adventurer’. ‘Trotsky was carried out of his apartment,’ Molotov reminisced with a discernible fondness for the scene; ‘two men carried him out. One was my chief of security, Pogudin … Pogudin was strong.’
The true revolutionaries wanted to break down the door of history and burst out of it. Their historical materialism ‘leads inevitably to the crumbling away of historical reality’, Berdyaev writes in The Meaning of History, and historical reality is ‘above all a concrete and not an abstract reality’. Beyond the outer door of the Molotov apartment, which was eight feet high and padded in black leather, was a heavy wooden inner door, elaborately carved on one side, lined on the other with more studded leather. (These are double doors, with a wide space between them, as in the college rooms, known as ‘sets’, of Cambridge dons.) Just inside, a closed-circuit security camera held tremulous black-and-white images on a split screen of the street entrance and the staircase. Leaving the lights off, I wandered through the rooms. Each of the apartments on the staircase is laid out differently, but, like the others, this one was divided into two halves: vast ‘ceremonial’ rooms for entertaining at the front, with intricately moulded cornices, and rooms of slightly lesser grandeur leading off back corridors for family life. On the right of the entry hall was a door leading into the family rooms, where a dim T-shaped corridor led to four large bedrooms, their walls lined in floral synthetic fabrics, patterned in dull oranges and browns. At the junction of the corridor was a revolving bookstand, which contained art books and a Russian translation, bound in cloth, of Winston Churchill’s multi-volume History of the Second World War, published in a tiny numbered edition, for restricted use, by the Soviet Ministry of Defence. I took a volume from the bookstand and leafed through its pages, stopping at a sentence which had prompted an exclamation mark in the margin: ‘If Hitler invaded hell, I would make at least a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.’ I sat down on an armchair beside the bookstand and turned the pages slowly, stopping at passages marked by their attentive earlier reader. ‘Vyacheslav Molotov was a man of outstanding ability and cold-blooded ruthlessness,’ recorded Churchilclass="underline"
He had survived the fearful hazards and ordeals to which all Bolshevik leaders had been subjected in the years of triumphant revolution. He had lived and thrived in a society where ever-varying intrigue was accompanied by the constant menace of personal liquidation. His cannon-ball head, black moustache, and comprehending eyes, his slab face, his verbal adroitness and imperturbable demeanour, were appropriate manifestations of his qualities and skill. He was above all men fitted to be the agent and instrument of the policy of an incalculable machine … I have never seen a human being who more perfectly represented the modern conception of a robot.
In the front half of the apartment were a drawing room, a dining room and a study. The drawing room was panelled two-thirds of the way up to the high ceiling in honey-coloured wood, inlaid with delicate marquetry, set with narrow polished columns. In the dining room, a two-tone marble fireplace, heavy and baroque, had been set into the original ceiling-high tiled dutch stove. Against one wall was a staid 1930s-style buffet which looked as though it should have a brass number plate on its back, like all the state-issued nomenklatura perquisites that once furnished No. 3. My landlord, a genial man, well satisfied by life (he was high up in the Supreme Soviet under Brezhnev and loved to tell tales of the alcoholism and domestic violence of the children of the Party elite), later told me that this dining room had been Molotov’s study. ‘He was a legend,’ he told me with a chuckle, pointing up at our ceiling, ‘but he was a coward. All Stalin’s men were cowards.’
Covering the old parquet in the drawing room was a large carpet – muted gold, pale pink and grey, figured with cypress trees, roses and gazelles – given to Molotov, I had been told, by the Shah of Persia. The chandeliers in the Molotov apartment were the hypertrophied black, bronze and sculpted-glass designs of the Stalin era, now sought after by collectors of Soviet ‘antiques’, though I was not able to tell whether they dated from the mid-1930s, when the Party said that life had become ‘happier and more beautiful’, and encouraged the acquisition of wallpapers, lampshades and phonograph recordings of jazz, or from the period of high Stalinist baroque after the war. Oil paintings in gilt frames hung on the walls: late-nineteenth-century sentimental genre scenes of peasant children sleeping in a huddle, fishermen on a seashore. Arranged in a display case was a collection of ivory and lacquer ornaments that the banker had told me were gifts to Molotov from Chairman Mao. In her memoir, Only One Year, Stalin’s daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva remembered with distaste the richly decorated homes of her father’s henchmen, ‘crammed with fine rugs, gold and silver Caucasian weapons, valuable porcelain’. After the Second World War (when Molotov was foreign minister), ‘waves of gifts began arriving from other, especially fraternal socialist countries and from China. Jade vases, carved ivory, Indian silks, Persian rugs, handicrafts from Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia … it is hard to imagine valuables that did not decorate the abodes of these “veterans of the Revolution”.’
The tendencies to personal accumulation were not spectres of the capitalist past in Soviet society, as Trotsky lamented in The Revolution Betrayed, but ‘new, mighty and continually reborn’. After the austerities of ‘war communism’, NEP quickly brought these tendencies back into play, to the dismay of true believers. The one idea of the ascetic librarian Fyodorov that the Soviet writer Maxim Gorky liked was the idea that in capitalist societies women drive consumerism, with their endless desire for ‘toys’. In a letter of 1926, he invoked Fyodorov (‘an original thinker’), who argued that ‘not only all industry but that all civilisation was women’s stuff’: ‘“The woman and the sexual forces she unleashes” create effeteness and consumption which in turn lead to degeneration and extinction. Such a domination by the woman was not just burdensome but destructive.’ Human beings are like birds, Fyodorov observed: ‘beautiful plumage and cosy nests have become fashionable clothes, plushy boudoirs and soft furniture, but they still serve in the same capacity as sexual stimulant’. The Soviet journalist ‘Zorich’ published a feuilleton with the title ‘Lady with a Little Dog’ (borrowed from Chekhov), in which he criticised Party boss Sergei Kirov’s pampered wife, who, when her husband was called up from Baku to Moscow in 1926 to rout the Trotskyites in the Party, commandeered a whole railway carriage for her pet dogs. Stalin reacted to the article by declaring Zorich guilty of spreading slander and falsehood. (In 1937 Zorich, whose real name was Vasili Lokot, was shot.) As the Soviet elite established its world of privilege, Trotsky denounced the ‘automobile-harem factor’ which, he said, shaped the morals of the ever more acquisitive bureaucracy. He scoffed at the Soviet discovery of the word luxe, and saw the wives of highly placed Party members, with their love of furs, jewellery, perfumes and soft furnishings, as chief culprits in the degeneration of the Bolsheviks into a ‘new aristocracy’, a caste committed to nothing so much as the protection of its own material privilege.