Old-fashioned femininity, commodified, and expressed through commodities, soon became incorporated, overtly and covertly, into the Party’s programme for the development of Soviet society. Molotov’s wife, Polina Zhemchuzhina, played a leading role in the fashioning of Soviet femininity. While Molotov, who was born Vyacheslav Skryabin, had adopted a suitably revolutionary pseudonym in 1915, from molot meaning ‘hammer’, his wife, the daughter of a Jewish tailor from a Cossack village in Zaporozhe in the Russian south, had changed her name from Perl Karpovskaya to Polina Zhemchuzhina, which means ‘little pearl’. Before joining the Communist Party in 1918, Zhemchuzhina had worked in a cigarette factory and as a cashier in a pharmacy. According to official Party mythology, Molotov met Zhemchuzhina, who was said to be ‘popular with the peasants’, on a farm, where she was supervising experiments with methods of sowing sugar-beet. In fact, the two met in a Moscow hospital in the summer of 1921, when Zhemchuzhina had been taken ill at an International Women’s Conference, to which she had come as a Party delegate from the south. As one of the organisers of the conference, Molotov paid her a courtesy visit. They fell in love and were ‘married’ within months, in de facto Bolshevik fashion. By all accounts, their mutual devotion was lifelong. Molotov treasured his pearl in memory as ‘beautiful, intelligent, and a genuine Bolshevik’; he had always loved her, he said, ‘with all his soul’.
The year after their marriage, Zhemchuzhina travelled to Czechoslovakia for further medical treatment, and Molotov made his first trip abroad to visit her, travelling on to Italy under a false name to observe ‘the rise of Fascism’. (‘Mysterious ailments’ were a constant feature of Zhemchuzhina’s life, Alliluyeva remembers, and when she became the ‘first lady’ of the Kremlin after the suicide of Stalin’s wife in 1932, she would often visit spas in Berlin and Karlovy Vary with a huge retinue of attendants.) After studying economics, Zhemchuzhina became director of a perfume factory called New Dawn in 1930. The factory soon changed its name to the Essential Oils Trust, and was known affectionately as ‘The Secret of Woman’. (At that time, Molotov was already head of the Council of People’s Commissars (Sovnarkom), and was engaged in the more serious Party business of directing the industrialisation of the First Five-Year Plan and the collectivisation of agriculture.) Throughout the 1930s, when she and Molotov were sharing quarters in the Kremlin with Stalin, Zhemchuzhina worked in light industry: in food and fisheries, cosmetics and perfumes, textiles, haberdashery and fancy goods. During and immediately after the Great Terror, her career advanced conspicuously. And after the head of the secret police, Genrikh Yagoda, was arrested at a meeting of the Council of People’s Commissars presided over by Molotov in the spring of 1937 (he was a ‘skunk … a filthy nobody … a reptile’, he told Chuev), the Molotovs took over his fine state dacha. In 1938 Zhemchuzhina launched a new toothpaste called Sanit, advertised with a poster of the beautiful smiling face of the female pilot Shura Kuvshinova. (In June of that year, just before the poster appeared, the Moscow artist who had designed it, Israel Bograd, was arrested and shot as an ‘English spy’.) In 1939, the year Molotov replaced Litvinov as Commissar of Foreign Affairs, Zhemchuzhina became Commissar of Fisheries and a ‘candidate member’ of the Central Committee.
Zhemchuzhina prided herself on being the best-dressed woman in the Soviet Union; she studied techniques for the production of silks and synthetics, and organised permits for European fashion houses to open branches in Moscow and Leningrad. Defying the tradition of female Bolshevik puritanism exemplified by Lenin’s fiercely plain wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, Zhemchuzhina encouraged Soviet women to use cosmetics: nail varnish, lipstick, powder and scent. She proudly invited foreign diplomats, like US Ambassador Joseph Davies, to visit the cosmetics factories, perfumeries and beauty salons opened under her auspices. Alliluyeva remembers that the Molotovs’ apartment and dacha ‘were distinguished by good taste and luxurious furniture (by Soviet standards, of course)’. Zhemchuzhina’s visits to Paris, Berlin and America when Molotov was Commissar of Foreign Affairs made her forget her humble past and her revolutionary ideals, Alliluyeva writes, and she hosted lavish diplomatic receptions at her dacha and in other official residences, delighting her guests with elaborate cuisine, elegant tableware and bountiful arrangements of lilac and cyclamen (her favourite flower). She ran her family like an aristocrat, hiring the best tutors in languages, music and gymnastics for her daughter who, like Stalin’s, was named Svetlana. She even fostered the daughter of kitchen workers whom she had noticed one day in the Fourth House of the Soviets, and raised the little girl, whose name was Sonia, as Svetlana’s sister in their Kremlin apartment. Sonia (known as ‘Molotova’ at school) remembers that, when Molotov telephoned Zhemchuzhina in the Crimea on 22 June 1941 to tell her that Hitler’s armies had invaded the USSR, her first reaction was to summon a hairdresser. Freshly coiffed and ready to leave for Moscow, she listened to Molotov’s midday radio declaration of war. ‘This unheard-of attack on our country is a perfidy unparalleled in the history of civilised nations …’ Molotov told the people of the USSR, failing for a moment to overcome his habitual stammer, as Zhemchuzhina’s manicurist worked on her nails.
How much interest did Molotov take in the acquisition or preservation of all the beautifications, knick-knacks and objets d’art that came to rest here, in the melancholy interior of his last Moscow home? Accounts of his feeling for material possessions vary greatly. Zhukovsky relates the Moscow rumour that when Molotov moved from his apartment in the Kremlin to a mansion on the scenic Lenin Hills, after Stalin’s death (Khrushchev’s new residences for Party bosses, built in ‘Stalin Empire’ style, were nicknamed ‘Lenin’s Testaments’), he demanded that his study be painted in the colours of a sunset. Alliluyeva remembers that these mansions had walls upholstered in silk, expensive wood panelling, marble mantels, massive pieces of state-owned furniture (and terrible plumbing). ‘We all had our weaknesses’, Molotov told Chuev, ‘and acquired some of the ways of the gentry. We were seduced into that lifestyle, there is no denying that.’ Yet Molotov looked down on the bon viveur and aesthete Voroshilov, whose homes were famously the most opulent and festive of all. And other members of the Party looked down on Molotov as a dreary killjoy, nicknaming him ‘stone arse’ because he spent so much time at his books. At his death, Molotov left only five hundred roubles to pay for his funeral; the housekeeper Tatiana who took care of him in his widowerhood at his last dacha in Zhukovka (which he had been granted in 1966 after much petitioning of the Party by Zhemchuzhina) claimed that his need for comfort was minimal, that he lived simply, as befitted a good communist, and never left lights on. Chuev describes his small attic study at the dacha: one window, a small desk with a volume of Chekhov and a couple of journals on it, and on the wall a political map of the world, under cellophane. ‘He asked for nothing … he did not need or like luxury, he owned neither carpets or chandeliers,’ remembered the woman who looked after the furniture storeroom in the dacha compound. After his death, she kept a reverent watch over his writing desk. Here in this vast Moscow apartment, an uncrumbled monument of the bourgeoisie, possessions seem to have closed around Molotov’s communist virtue with a sneering, combative gleam: dead things, though not mute, like the death-lists that remain in the archives with his signature (and epithets in his hand like ‘scum’ and ‘bastard’) all over them: the material legacy of a life in power, of the consequences of theories he took from books and turned into the divining rod of virtue, and his own dogged work of survival.