The danger posed by the porous borders of its multi-ethnic periphery underpinned Stalin’s commitment to a strong, centralised Soviet state. He was a centraliser who subordinated the periphery of the former Russian Empire to its advanced proletarian Russian core. National and ethnic minorities were allowed regional and cultural autonomy but denied the possibility of self-government. This practice chimed with the view he had expressed in Marxism and the National Question (1913) and other writings: the Bolsheviks supported national self-determination in theory but reserved the right to repress nationalist movements if they threatened the interests of the working class and endangered the socialist revolution.
As Rieber also showed, Stalin’s borderlands policy was central to his domestic as well as his foreign policy. Forced collectivisation of agriculture and accelerated industrialisation were part of the struggle to secure the backward and underdeveloped borderlands. The Great Terror of the 1930s was in large part an ethnic purge of perceived nationalist elements in the borderlands.45
The sweep of Stalin’s interests is captured by an anecdote about a map of the USSR’s new borders that was brought to him just after the war:
The map was small – like those for school textbooks. Stalin pinned it to the walclass="underline" ‘Let’s see what we have here. . . . Everything is all right to the north. Finland has offended us, so we moved the border from Leningrad. Baltic States – that’s age-old Russian land! – and they are ours again. All the Belorussians live together now, Ukrainians together, Moldovans together. It’s OK to the west.’ And he turned to the eastern borders. ‘What do we have here? The Kuril Islands belong to us now, Sakhalin is completely ours – you see, good! And Port Arthur’s ours, and Dairen is ours’ – Stalin moved his pipe across China – ‘and the Chinese Eastern Railway is ours. China, Mongolia – everything is in order. But I don’t like our border right here!’ Stalin said and pointed south of the Caucasus.46
Stalin was adamant that he would keep all these territories, not least because of his strategic goal of ethno-political stability along Soviet borders.
Stalin’s ambitions south of the Caucasus centred on claims that Turkey should return the provinces of Kars and Ardahan to the USSR. These areas of eastern Turkey with Armenian and Georgian populations had been part of the Tsarist Empire from 1878 until 1921, when a Soviet–Turkish treaty transferred the two districts to Turkey. While there was communist-inspired nationalist agitation for the return of these territories to Georgia and Armenia, Stalin’s main aim was to put pressure on Turkey to share control of the Black Sea straits with the USSR.
He also sponsored an Azerbaijani separatist movement in Iran, which threatened to split the country by linking up with Soviet Azerbaijan. In this case his motives were mostly economic – to secure a Soviet oil concession in northern Iran.
Stalin focused on the countries and territories that bordered the USSR, but his geopolitical outlook was global. As a Bolshevik internationalist he paid attention to revolutionary struggles across the world. Among the remnants of his library are many books on Britain, France, Germany, China and the United States and a good number of texts on Ireland, India, Indochina, Indonesia, Italy, Japan and Mexico (including a translation of John Reed’s book on the Mexican Revolution) as well as volumes on imperialism, colonialism, slavery, and oil and world politics.
The USSR was primarily a land power but in the 1930s Stalin embraced the idea of building a powerful ocean-going navy and his collection contained a 1932 Russian translation of Some Principles of Maritime Strategy by Julian Stafford Corbett, a British sea-power theorist who emphasised the importance of wartime control of the seas, as opposed to large-scale fleet actions. In various conversations with Churchill during the war, Stalin lamented that while the United States controlled the Panama Canal and Britain the Suez Canal, the Soviet Union had no control over the Black Sea straits.47
LIFE AND DEATH AT THE DACHA
Blizhnyaya served many purposes for Stalin. It was an extension of his Kremlin office, a playground for his children and a reception for visiting foreign communists. It was a place to party with his political cronies and listen to his extensive collection of gramophone records (he liked to watch his comrades dance, apparently).48 It was a secure and secluded spot in which he could relax and do some gardening. But, above all, time spent at the dacha was a break from affairs of state and the opportunity to browse his books.
Never was downtime more necessary than during the war when Stalin worked twelve- to fifteen-hour shifts in the Kremlin. ‘Many allied visitors who called at the Kremlin during the war were astonished to see on how many issues, great and small, military, political or diplomatic, Stalin took the final decision,’ wrote Isaac Deutscher in his 1948 biography. ‘He was in effect his own commander-in-chief, his own minister of defence, his own quartermaster, his own foreign minister, and even his own chef de protocole. . . . Thus he went on, day after day, throughout four years of hostilities – a prodigy of patience, tenacity, and vigilance, almost omnipresent, almost omniscient.’49 Research in the Russian archives has amply borne out Deutscher’s graphic picture of Stalin as the ever-busy warlord.50
By the end of the Second World War, Stalin was sixty-six years old. Four years of intense toil as supreme commander had exacted a personal toll and he began to take long vacations by the Black Sea. Aside from these vacations, the pattern of his working life was much the same as before, although he did step back from the day-to-day running of the country, leaving a little more time for leisure and reading when he was on holiday or at Blizhnyaya. Svetlana had long since left home and in 1951 the dacha’s library was enlarged by the incorporation of what had been her bedroom.
Given how much time Stalin spent at Blizhnyaya, the chances were that he would die there, and so he did in March 1953 at the age of seventy-three. There are many conspiracy theories about his death but the truth is that he suffered a stroke on 1 March and died four days later.51 On the day of his death Soviet leaders established a subgroup tasked with ‘putting the documents and papers of Comrade Stalin, his archive as well as all current materials, in proper order’.52 The group consisted of head of government Georgy Malenkov, security chief Lavrenty Beria and deputy party leader Nikita Khrushchev. Two days later Beria’s security personnel removed all Stalin’s belongings and furniture from the dacha.
When Stalin fell ill, Svetlana was summoned to Blizhnyaya from a French class. ‘Strange things happened at Kuntsevo after my father died,’ she recalled:
The very next day . . . Beria had the whole household, servants and bodyguards, called together and told that my father’s belongings were to be removed right away. . . . In 1955, when Beria himself had ‘fallen’, they started to restore the dacha. My father’s things were brought back. The former servants and commandants were invited back and helped put everything where it belonged and make the house look as it had before. They were preparing to open a museum, like the one in Lenin’s house in Leninskiye Gorki.53