Courtiers and communists

Philip Mansel

STALIN: THE COURT OF THE RED TSAR by Simon Sebag Montefiore Weidenfeld & Nicholson, £25.00, pp. 693 ISBN 1842127268 Courts can be a tool for understanding the present as well as the past. The behaviour patterns of courts and courtiers are often a better guide to the workings of modern regimes than constitutions or ideologies. In The Last Days of Hitler, Hugh TrevorRoper analysed the government of the Third Reich as a 'cannibal court'.

In his spectacular new work Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, Simon Sebag Montefiore does the same for the Soviet Union under Stalin. He analyses the lives and 'informal power and customs' of the top 20 men in the Soviet leadership, as well as Stalin himself, in the years from the suicide of Stalin's wife Nadya on 8 November 1932 to his death on 5 March 1953. Scbag Montefiore, author of a brilliant life of the most successful courtier of Catherine the Great, Prince Potemkin, presents the Soviet leadership as a court of magnates, fawning and intriguing around the 'red Tsar'. Personalities, emotions, and the cult of 'strong leadership', are considered more important than Marxist ideology: proximity to Stalin, a better guide to power than rank in the 'CC' (central committee). As in any court, material rewards were also important.

Sebag Montefiore describes the distribution of cars, extra food rations and secret `pakets' of money, as favours among the elite (including Maxim Gorky); the size of the Stalin portrait in their residence often indicated the degree of their power in the government. The leaders lived beside each other 'like a family', both in the Kremlin 'village' and on holiday. Sebag Montefiore devotes many pages to the 'frantic networking' on holidays, in Georgia as well as in dachas around Moscow (for the devotee. Stalin's dacha at Kuntsevo, where much of the action in this book took place, has been restored to its condition in his day, down to his shaving brushes and gramophone): 'more careers were made, more intrigues clinched on those sunny verandahs than on the snowy battlements of the Kremlin', writes Sebag Montefiore. Magnates such as Malenkov or Beria, like bosses in the Third Reich, built up their own patronage empires, with favourite writers and artists, as well as ministries. In a crisis, official channels were abandoned for personal connections: 'Everyone goes to see someone, there's no other way', wrote Nadezhda Mandelstam.

The principal social, in some cases policy-making, occasions under Stalin, according to Sebag Montefiore, were his drunken, protracted dinners, some of which lasted 12 hours. In Stalin's residences, many of which the author has visited and photographed, the dining-room was always the largest room. Drinking contests were orchestrated by the leader; guests were dragged vomiting from the table; Zhdanov and Bulganin became alcoholics.

Sebag Montefiore shows that traditional patterns of behaviour could reappear behind the façade of Marxist-Leninism. Stalin, who loved reading history books, identified with Shahs as well as Tsars. A Georgian, born closer to Baghdad than to Moscow, 'he talked Georgian, ate Georgian. sang Georgian' — and, in his last years, spent half his time in Georgia. Some of the communist bosses, like Lenin himself, had noble origins: Chicherin, Molotov, Sergo. Zhdanov, and the founder of the Cheka, Felix Dzerzhinsky. Old habits died hard; in order to enhance 'order and discipline', epaulettes and gold braid were restored to officers' uniforms in 1943. Marshal Zhukov took the salute at the 24 June 1945 victory parade in Moscow, riding a white horse like sovereigns and generals in the past, only because Stalin could not master the horse in question. Stalin's personality cult reached the point where one official proposed to rename Moscow Stalinodar. He justified the cult by saying the people needed a god or a Tsar. From Moscow to Paris, people wept at news of his death.

This is an impressive and compelling work, using important new documents, including the Kremlin log-book and communists' love letters, from a variety of Moscow archives, such as those of the Ministry of Defence and the Russian State Archive of Social and Political History. The author has also interviewed children and grand-children of Soviet leaders, and survivors from the 1940s, including both an English and a Russian interpreter, Hugh Lunghi and Oleg Troyanovksy The photographs are excellent. Sometimes Stalin and his colleagues, on fishing trips or picnics, look normal; on other occasions, photographed in the court yards of the Kremlin, they resemble Mafia bosses in an American film. In one photograph, surrounded by ten women, including his beaming mistress Zhenya Alliluyeva (the only one to wear a lace collar), Stalin looks like a Red Rasputin.

With 583 densely printed pages of text, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar is very long. Particularly in the first half of the book, the number of officials mentioned is likely to confuse those new to the corridors of the Kremlin. Among 'M's alone, the reader encounters Molotov. Mikoyan, Mikhaels, Mekhlis, Merkulov, Merestov and Stalin's appalling architect Merxhanov. So much detail is provided on Soviet leaders' houses, parties and divorces that there is a hint of 'Gulag meets Hello'.

The second half of the book, dominated by the struggle with Hitler. and Stalin's approaching death, is easier to follow. Particularly fascinating are the details about Stalin's plan to leave Moscow as the German army approached in October 1941. In Moscow law and order temporarily broke down. The British embassy was looted. Beria himself advised abandoning the capital. Stalin strolled beside a steaming train, ready to go East; his beloved library was on board. In the end, however, probably persuaded by Marshal aukov, he decided to stay. Throughout the war, he made so many mistakes, that the Soviet Union could be said to have won despite, rather than because of. Stalin. Even when, in June 1941, the German embassy had begun to burn its archives, Stalin had refused to believe Hitler would attack.

The comparison with a court does not always work. There was no dynasty — despite Sebag Montefiore's description of Stalin's feeble drunken son Vasily as 'crown prince'. Except in their consumption of alcohol, the magnates at Stalin's dinners bore little resemblance to the boyars of Ivan the Terrible. The former were communist officials, who, as Sebag Montefiore points out, had little desire for their children to enter politics; the latter were Christian nobles. The Iraq of Stalin's admirer Saddam Hussein, whose family tree was the country's real constitution, bore a closer resemblance to a court system.

Terror, moreover, made Stalin's Russia a world of its own. At first his entourage had not been especially frightened of Stalin. He could be charming, sometimes flirtatious. Communists were prepared to disagree with him, even to forget to come to dinner. In 1934 the assassination of the Leningrad party boss Kirov changed everything. Guards were posted every ten metres along the Kremlin corridors; Stalin's 'holy fear' grew until he would drink or smoke only if he broke the seal of the bottle or the packet of cigarettes himself. The yellow pupils of his eyes were compared to those of a cobra about to strike.

Under Stalin every night could be a Night of the Long Knives. By 1939 he had killed so many of the best generals that even the small Finnish army could defeat the Red Army. The Terror, begun and masterminded by Stalin, was joyfully encouraged by his subordinates: his favourite Khrushchev, party boss in the Ukraine, was especially blood-thirsty. Regions were allotted ever larger quotas of victims, to be shot or imprisoned: with true communist zeal, the quotas were always exceeded. As Stalin said: 'better an innocent head less than hesitations in the war.' Sebag Montefiore has chilling phrases about 'terror entrepreneurship' and 'the etiquette of unpersonage.'

So many parties are described in The Court of the Red Tsar that the Party itself, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, is marginalised. Yet, as Sebag Montefiore shows, Stalin and others were true believers in Marxist Leninism. If writers or artists were attacked by the Party, their protectors abandoned them. The horror of private property was such that some leaders did not own their own towels. Sebag Montefiore's explanation for the Terror is that Soviet Communism under Stalin was 'a sort of military-religious order', a faith which commanded the leader and his followers to kill all class enemies 'from the smugness of the highest moral eminence'. Its success was also helped by the destruction of all independent networks, institutions, and religions, even more characteristic of the Russian, than of other 20th century Revolutions.

The principal communist sceptic was the most repellent, and intelligent, of them all, the mass murderer and Secret Police chief Beria, a rapist whose bouquets of flowers to his victims often served as their funeral wreaths. All Beria's projects, including the Soviet nuclear programme, worked smoothly. Svetlana Stalin called him 'a magnificent modern specimen of the artful courtier'. By the end 'utterly bourgeois', he was making fun of Stalin (whom he may have helped to murder with a blood

thinning drug), and proclaimed: 'The USSR can never succeed until we have private property'.

The Court of the Red Tsar shows the horrors which could result from communist zeal. In times of revolution, if all zeal corrupts, absolute zeal corrupts absolutely. Few revolutionary politicians heeded Talleyrand's advice to young diplomats: surtout pas trop de zele.