No public mention was made of the existence, let alone location, of Stalin’s private Moscow residence, even as the entire regime became organized around it. A team of chauffeurs remained on twenty-four-hour call at the special Kremlin garage, which was jammed with foreign makes. Stalin had acquired a 1929 Rolls-Royce but was usually driven in a Packard, a premier luxury brand he had come to love since the Tsaritsyn days (when he rode in a Packard Twin Six “touring car”).237 In 1933, the regime had purchased the new Packard Twelve in the United States (Stalin would travel with the top down, from Sochi to Abkhazia and back, just for the ride). He preferred the jump seat, facing forward, which he pulled down himself. One guard sat on the backseat, and another next to the driver. Stalin’s Packard drove right up to his entrance of the Imperial Senate; exiting the Kremlin, at the Borovitskaya Gates, he traveled west along Znamenka, then the Arbat, Smolensk Square, Borodino Bridge, Great Dorogomilov Street, and onto the old Mozhaisk Highway to a hidden sharp left turnoff at Volynskoe. Service personnel nicknamed the route “the Georgian Military Highway,” in reference to the actual road in the Caucasus.
Inside the dacha, Stalin and his guests, by custom, wore slippers (he tucked his trousers into his socks). An intercom connected all the rooms. The hot water heater was imported. A separate building, some 200 yards from the principal residence, housed a kitchen, which had a traditional Russian-style stove, which beckoned when his rheumatism acted up. The auxiliary structure contained a Russian-style bathhouse and billiard room, too. Master artisans from around the country fabricated much of the furniture, doors, and wall paneling at Moscow’s Lux Factory. A wooden bed that workmen had used became Stalin’s. Contrary to legend, he slept in the bedroom (some 200 square feet). The floors were also made of wood. The dining room, off to the right of the entrance, had a long table, an upright piano, and a gramophone. Stalin collected records, favoring the danceable light romances of Pyotr Leshchenko and especially the émigré Alexander Vertinsky.238 During and after meals, he convened regime meetings. According to Mikoyan, the dictator ate slowly but had a healthy appetite. “Stalin loved a variety of fish dishes,” he wrote. “Danube herring he loved very much. . . . He loved poultry: guinea fowl, duck, flattened young chicken. He loved thin rack of lamb cooked on a spit. . . . Thin bones, a little meat, dry-broiled.”239 Lakoba would bring racks of lamb from Abkhazia.
The Near Dacha was built with children’s bedrooms, but Vasily (age thirteen) and Svetlana (eight) continued to live in the Kremlin apartment below their father’s office and to spend weekends and summers at Zubalovo.240 (Yakov Jughashvili, age twenty-six, lived at Granovsky, 3.) Full-time care of the children fell to Til as well as Pauker, who had been born in Habsburg Lemberg (Lwów, Lviv, Lvov), of Jewish extraction, the son of a barber, from whom he had learned the trade.241 Vasily, red haired like his mother, with a pimply face, initially was sent to School No. 20; Svetlana began at No. 25, a model school known for “very tough, strict discipline,” as Pauker reported to Stalin. (Vasily was transferred there.)242 Their father’s portrait hung in the school, which offered radio and electrotechnology, airplane and automobile modeling, ballroom dancing, theater, a rifle team, parachute jumping, volleyball, hockey, excursions to the State Tretyakov Gallery, summer camps in Crimea. Perhaps 85 percent of the teaching staff did not belong to the party. Vasily’s closest friend was nicknamed “Collective Farm Boy” (his mother, from a village, scrubbed the school’s floors). But his friends could not visit him at home. Stalin would sometimes read aloud to Vasily and Artyom. “Once he almost laughed to the point of tears,” Artyom recalled of a reading of the satirist Mikhail Zoshchenko, “and then he said, ‘And here comrade Zoshchenko remembered about the GPU and changed the ending!’”243
Stalin’s own son was a rambunctious type, signing his letters “Red Vaska.” Perhaps he misbehaved, at least in part, to get his father’s attention. “With a reluctant heart,” the bodyguard Vlasik would recall, “we had to report his behavior to his father, ruining his mood.”244 Vasily observed how his father doted on his younger sister, with constant reminders that Svetlana was a good example.245 Svetlana studied hard under the guidance of her nanny, Bychkova.246 “Stalin, someone who absolutely lacked sentimentalism, expressed such untypical gentleness toward his daughter,” recalled Candide Charkviani, a Georgian official. “‘My Little Hostess,’ Stalin would say, and seat Svetlana on his lap and give her kisses. ‘Since she lost her mother, I have kept telling her that she is the mistress of the house,’ Stalin told us.”247 Stalin instructed her to issue orders, and she would address written commands to “Secretary No. 1,” and he would answer, “I submit.” She also recalled, however, that he was absent. “Once in a while,” she wrote, “he enjoyed the sounds of children playing.” Stalin would overnight at the Near Dacha. “Sometimes before he left, he’d come to my room in his overcoat to kiss me good night as I lay sleeping,” Svetlana added. “He liked kissing me while I was little, and I’ll never forget how tender he was to me.”248 She was heard to utter, “Let the whole world hate me, as long as Papa loves me. If Papa tells me to go to the moon, I’ll go.”249, 250
Into the public vacuum about Stalin’s personal life stepped Kyrill Kakabadze, a Soviet trade representative in Berlin for Georgia’s manganese mines, who had defected and published a defamatory essay in the British Sunday Express (April 8, 1934) that purported to describe Stalin’s “orgies” at a “personal estate” in Zubalovo of 300,000 acres. “Stalin lives like a tsar,” he wrote, supposedly costing the state ₤300,000 a year and 1,000 lives a day. “Stalin took for himself huge apartments that had once been inhabited by Ivan the Terrible.” Soviet representatives in London begged for compromising material on Kakabadze for release to the British press (the OGPU went to work, discovering that he was from a merchant family), then the German press republished the Kakabadze articles.251 Stalin took it out on Beria, his minion for all things Georgian, writing (April 14) that, “besides the Georgian carousers and scamps arrested in Moscow hotels, there is another large group in Leningrad. The dissoluteness of so-called representatives of Georgian economic organizations has placed shame on the South Caucasus organizations. We oblige you to take immediate measures to liquidate the unseemliness, if you do not want the South Caucasus to end up in the court of the Central Committee.”252
COMMON ENEMIES
Stalin had fixed a covetous eye on Chinese Turkestan, or Xinjiang (“New Territory”). From January through April 1934, he fought a small war there. Renewal of a mass Muslim rebellion had spurred Comintern operatives to contemplate pushing for a socialist revolution, but Soviet military intelligence had pointed out that, even though the rebels commanded the loyalty of almost the entire Muslim population (90 percent), a successful Muslim independence struggle in Chinese Turkestan could inspire the Kazakhs and Kyrgyz in Soviet Turkestan or even the Mongols. Stalin had decided to send about 7,000 OGPU and Red Army soldiers, as well as airplanes, artillery, mustard gas, and Soviet Uzbek Communists, to defend the Chinese warlord. Remarkably, he allowed Soviet forces to combine with former White Army soldiers abroad, who were promised amnesty and Soviet citizenship. A possible Muslim rebel victory turned into a defeat. Unlike the Japanese in Manchuria, Stalin did not set up an independent state, but he solidified his informal hold on Xinjiang, setting up military bases, sending advisers, and gaining coal, oil, tungsten, and tin concessions. Some 85 percent of Xinjiang’s trade was with the USSR.253 British and Japanese observers and Chinese newspapers railed against Soviet “imperialism.”254 Chiang Kai-shek became dependent on Soviet goodwill to communicate with Xinjiang’s capital, Ürümqi.255