Fear was the primary force behind the dictator’s patrimonial power over his top associates and other highly placed officials. With the Soviet state security system under his firm control, Stalin could arrest anyone at any moment and have the person summarily shot. He did so countless times. The entire patrimonial political enterprise rested on terror.
The most important decisions were always made through direct—ideally face-to-face—communication with the dictator. This was the fastest and most effective way for an official to achieve personal and administrative objectives. But communication required access to the seats of power, places that for countless Soviet officials and members of the top leadership took on an almost sacred aura. Some were more sacred than others. There was an unspoken hierarchy in the various settings from which Stalin wielded power, and admission to some endowed greater status than others. Stalin spent a significant portion of his life in these seats of power. Each reflected some aspect of his personality and dictatorship.
The primary and most official seat of power was Stalin’s Kremlin office. This commodious, oak-paneled study was divided into two zones: Stalin’s desk and a long conference table. Other furnishings included a grandfather clock (which Stalin used to monitor the promptness with which those summoned arrived) and a plaster death mask of Lenin encased in glass and displayed on a special stand. On the walls hung portraits of Lenin and Marx. During the war, they were joined by the tsarist-era military heroes Aleksandr Suvorov and Mikhail Kutuzov. Otherwise the decor hardly changed over the many years he spent there. During the war, the bomb shelter built beneath the Kremlin contained a slightly smaller but otherwise almost exact replica of this office: the same furniture, the same pictures, the same curtains (despite the lack of windows).4
Over thirty years, approximately three thousand different people visited the Kremlin office.5 Stalin’s closest associates, of course, were there frequently, but the visitors also included heads of government ministries and enterprises, academics, cultural figures, senior state security and military personnel, and foreign guests. The Kremlin office was the most accessible of the seats of Stalin’s power.
On the evening of 28 February 1953, Bulganin, Beria, Malenkov, and Khrushchev, who had been called to the Kremlin by Stalin, did not linger in this office. Stalin immediately took them to the Kremlin movie theater, a much more exclusive place. The theater was a 7.5-by-17-meter space with twenty seats, installed in 1934 where Russia’s tsars had once enjoyed a winter garden. Before it was built, Soviet leaders watched movies either outside the Kremlin, in the building of the cinematography directorate, or in a small Kremlin room that had been used for silent films.6 Stalin enjoyed watching movies with his comrades, and these viewing sessions gradually became obligatory. Thanks to detailed records kept by Boris Shumiatsky, who oversaw the Soviet film industry, we know quite a bit about how these evenings in the movie theater were spent during 1934–1936.7 Shumiatsky would bring the movies and listen to the comments of Stalin and his colleagues, as well as the decisions that were sometimes taken during a viewing. His notes provide a valuable window onto the rules of behavior within Stalin’s inner circle and the atmosphere of these gatherings.
As a rule, the viewing sessions began late in the evening and extended into the early hours of the morning. Stalin sat in the front row, surrounded by members of the top leadership. There was always a great deal of discussion about the movies and newsreels, both while a film was rolling and afterward. Stalin always had the first word. He would issue instructions concerning the content of specific films, the Soviet film industry, and ideology in general. In the movie theater, he made on-the-spot decisions on everything from budgetary issues to the publication of policy-setting articles in the Soviet press to personnel matters. Filmmakers would occasionally be invited to viewings of their films. Such an invitation was a great honor. Stalin would congratulate them on their work and offer “guidance” on improving it. Shumiatsky’s records make it clear that these get-togethers in the Kremlin movie theater were not merely relaxation for the Soviet leadership. They were informal meetings of the top level of government at which questions of ideology and cultural policy were decided. Most likely, Stalin and his colleagues also discussed other affairs of state before and after the viewings.
Shumiatsky’s records end abruptly in early 1937. This was undoubtedly tied to the intensification of repression in the country. Shumiatsky himself was arrested in early 1938 and shot soon after. Stalin’s movie viewing continued, but we know almost nothing about later sessions. It appears that toward the end of his life, only his closest associates were admitted to the Kremlin movie theater. The 28 February meeting of the Five was Stalin’s last movie-theater get-together.
When the movie was over, Stalin, as he often did, invited the others to dine with him at his dacha near the Moscow suburb of Volynskoe. The dacha was just a few minutes away, earning it the nickname of “the near [dacha]” (blizhniaia). Occasionally the seat of power would shift to one or another of the houses or dachas around Moscow or in the south, where Stalin spent lengthy annual vacations. But the “near” dacha held a special place in his heart. It was an important epicenter of his life and rule.
The first house on the site of the near dacha was built in 1933. The move there was associated with upheavals in Stalin’s personal and political life. The terrible famine that swept the land in the early 1930s as a result of Stalin’s policies coincided with family tragedy. In November 1932 his wife, Nadezhda Allilueva, died by her own hand.8 Stalin started a new life in a new place.
Stalin personally oversaw the near dacha’s many expansions and renovations. The huge house that resulted was an odd blend of the institutional and the pretentious.9 All the rooms resembled one another and were, in the words of Stalin’s daughter Svetlana, “impersonal.”10 The second floor, for which an elevator had been installed, was rarely used. Stalin’s favorite room toward the end of his life was the so-called “small dining room” on the first floor. This roomy space contained a rectangular table three meters long, a couch, a cupboard, an easy chair, a small telephone table, and a fireplace. A pair of binoculars, hanging from a hook, and a hunting rifle were kept next to the fireplace. A large carpet covered the floor. The room led to a glassed-in veranda and a terrace. According to Svetlana, Stalin both slept and worked in this room. The large table was always piled with papers and books. Unless he had company, he ate at one of the table’s corners. He kept his medicines in the cupboard. Stalin enjoyed sitting by the fire, where he would sometimes order shashlik to be roasted. He liked to receive his visitors here. It is also where he suffered the stroke that ended his life.
The dacha was surrounded by a fifty-acre park. Stalin personally oversaw the landscaping and farming that took place on the grounds. He designed a greenhouse for citrus plants, supervised the installation of a vineyard, grew his own watermelons, and kept a pond stocked with fish. He sometimes had a portion of his watermelon crop sent to Moscow stores. There were also horses, cows, chickens, ducks, and a small apiary. His bodyguards testified that Stalin devoted a great deal of time to the running of this agricultural enterprise and kept track of even the smallest details. Hundreds of orders from Stalin to the man in charge of running the estate, Lieutenant Colonel P. V. Lozgachev, have been preserved:
7 April 1950: a) Start planting watermelons and melons in raised beds on 10 May; b) In mid-July, trim the watermelon and melon vines.…