Yuri Druzhnikov

Contemporary Russian Myths.
A Skeptical View of the Literary Past

Visiting Stalin's, Uninvited

      A certain Moscow writer (I'll leave out his name to avoid offense), thoroughly successful, but at the time young and purposeful, finished a poem at the beginning of 1953. Its hero was a boy, very touchingly rendered, who goes with a package to Red Square, straight up to the Spasskaya tower. So as to forestall any more-contemporary thoughts of his possible unsavory designs, I'll make it clear right here: the boy wanted to give a present to Joseph Stalin, and in this fashion express the love of millions of children. Although "millions" is a political error. I should have said "all" children.
      They don't let the boy in. That is to say, yes, please, in general, Stalin loves children like no one else. But right now let's exclude that. Grown men turn their faces to the vague heaven beyond the Kremlin walls: there, see, where the window is shining? There he stands at the helm, day and night. He's writing away. When he's not writing, he's thinking. "There, in the Kremlin, he's thinking about every single one of us." He's thinking about the fate of mankind. Even about you, little boy. Leave your present here. It'll be passed on to him when Comrade Stalin comes to the mausoleum to commune for a while with Grandpa Lenin. Did you write your name on it? There's a good boy, run along home quick as you can, now.
      Here the little boy sprouts angels' wings and happily flies away. Or maybe not. Having carried out his Pioneer's duty, maybe he just makes off on his own two feet. And the Wise One in the Kremlin, breaking off from his strenuous labors for just a second, walks up to the window and, squinting in the sunlight, sees the boy off with his warm gaze. Stereotypes continue to be hypnotic: in Russian, the word "boy" almost demands to be written as malchik, without its soft sign after the L, just the way he pronounced it in his Georgian accent. But we won't. After all, in his linguistic treatises he never proscribed the use of the soft sign. But he could have. And nobody would have said a critical word about it.
      The poem's theme wasn't exactly a hundred percent original. Take the following, for example: "Stalin often smokes a pipe, but perhaps he has no pouch. I'll sew up a wonderful tobacco pouch for him as a souvenir." A girl in my class during the war recited this poem with the word korset ("corset") in place of the word kiset ("tobacco pouch"). Another pupil said the word as kastet ("brass knuckles"). Where these children are now, I don't know. As far as the semantics of their recitation pieces goes, theory tells us that porridge is none the worse for a little butter. In a general sense, this very subject was given its definitive form a long time ago in the underworld-style song "Mama, I love Stalin."
      Everyone was supposed to love him. Many did love him—where would you draw the line now? To this day, certain people honor him. But we're not talking of love anymore, as the perspicacious reader will have realized. Neither are we talking about poetry (toward the end of the 1970s, Colgate University Professor Richard Sylvester acquainted me with his plan for a paper on Stalin as the hero of Soviet poetry, although he's never published it, as far as I know). The frequency with which eulogies to Stalin appeared in the press of the 1930s and 1940s has been ascertained. A list has been compiled of all the epithets that were ever bestowed on him, the likes of "The Great Helmsman" or "Soviet Women's Best Friend." This much we know. So what are we in fact talking about here? Well, let's raise some entirely prosaic questions in response to that one. For starters, why did the poem's protagonists meet at the Kremlin? Where, in fact, did Stalin really live? Where was the country governed from?
      Like every single Soviet citizen, he was registered to live someplace. Not in heaven. The place where he was registered was certainly the Kremlin. The gaze of progressive (and unprogressive) humanity was directed upon his registered residence, while he, like many another Soviet, lived unregistered somewhere else. Throughout his life this was the strategic secret guarded by a highly select number of persons (not counting the special services).
      The majority of the people he saw on business (or whatever) were taken to the Kremlin, where he continued to appear at times, after he had moved. VIPs, especially foreign Communists arriving from abroad, were delivered in automobiles with curtained windows to where he lived. The escorts would say, "We're taking you to the Kremlin." Such a serious game. Sufficiently serious that even many years later this official myth served as the source of information even for authoritative writers. The scrupulously exact Robert Conquest, in his book The Great Terror (published in 1969), established that Stalin lived in a modest flat in the Kremlin.
      It has to be definitively revealed that the general secretary left the Kremlin for a Moscow suburb in 1934. His apartment in the Kremlin remained as it was. In constant expectation of an attempt on his life (like Arafat today), he would never even tell his personal secretary Aleksandr Poskrebyshev and his bodyguard-chief general Nikolay Vlasik that he was going home until the very last moment. But he would nearly always go home to his secret residence. At one time this house had been intended for less-official meetings, while important foreigners were to pay their visits to the Kremlin. Then a period ensued where he refrained from traveling, and then, just like a lot of old folks, even stopped going out of his abode altogether. He even stopped communing with Lenin in his mausoleum.
      In official secret papers the place was called "Out-Of-Town Site No.1." In the jargon shared by his guards, his courtiers, and the man himself, the Kuntsevo dacha was called "Nearest," in contrast to other dachas of his, further out. This jargon was for use in telephone conversations that might be overheard by enemies of the people. More precisely, it was located in the old village of Volynskoye, but the entire district was included in Kuntsevo. According to certain sources, a tunnel for special cars was constructed from the Kremlin to the dacha, and according to others, an entire secret subway line. It is said that Stalin traveled by the tunnel only once, and then always went by the Arbat and the Minskoye highway as far as the turn onto his personal road.
      I found out about the Kuntsevo hideaway by being at this very house, that is, by paying a visit to Stalin. True, the master of the house had died half a year before. I found myself there at the end of 1953. And despite the frivolity of youth, the shock was strong enough to fix the details fast in my memory.
      Later on this house was referred to in Svetlana Alliluyeva's book. We'll have to compare what the author of Twenty Letters to a Friend of course knows better with what I, however, saw with my own two eyes. Svetlana Josephovna says that she was at the Kuntsevo house for the last time on the day of Stalin's death. Differing versions and those details that Alliluyeva forgot to mention leap out as important, and curious.
      I was a third-year student in the Department of Russian history and literature of the State Pedagogical institute in Moscow on Pirogovka Street. Right now in America and on other continents there are not a few graduates of that institute—maybe we should organize a reunion. The member of our immediate group who had the responsibility for our Education-for-the-Masses events was a slender blonde girl, Nina.
      More efficient than the rest of us, she got married, naturally enough, to another classmate of ours. She turned out to be hard and spoiled, with a quarrelsome character. She would argue with her husband during lectures, making the whole body of students in the auditorium—and sometimes even the professor—a party to their family quarrel. It was as if our lecture on foreign literature of the Renaissance were being given in a communal kitchen.
      Always hungry, many of us would drool and gulp on breaks when she would pull a sandwich with red or white fish out of her little green lunchbox, or some kind of fruit in winter. Eight years had passed since the end of the war, but many of us in the group hadn't once eaten our fill since the beginning of it. But Nina's community activities earned our respect. She looked after our collective with excursions to the movies and museums, took care our little credit union, out of which a ruble might be made when some outstanding debt was paid. At the end of one November, Nina came up to me between lectures and asked in a whisper:
      "How would you like to get on the list of people who want to visit Stalin's house?"
      My eyes popped.
      "More than likely it won't happen," she added hurriedly, "but there is a chance. No questions! Keep as quiet as a fish, and carry your passport with you at all times."
      It remained to figure out what the deal was: rumor had it that Nina's father was the head of the household administration of the Kremlin.
      The times were strange. Stalin had been bewailed eight months before. Our leaders had closed ranks in fear of disappearing one by one, and had shot the far-too-ambitious Lavrenty Beria, just in case. Secret shakeups were going on upstairs. Nikita Khrushchev broke away into the lead, but the gap between him and the rest remained easily surmountable. The head of the cultural affairs department of the Central Committee, who was also the Esteemed-Memory-of-Stalin-Secretary of the Soviet Writers' Union (as if there could be a non-Soviet writers' union), Dmitry Polikarpov, suddenly turned up, in disgrace, as director of our institute in Pirogovka.
      We brightened up considerably and just barely dared to have a real student party, I and my schoolmates and later recognized poets Yuri Vizbor, Yuli Kim, and Yuri Ryashentsev (someone christened us "The Third Cousins" in a Russian pun: chetveroYUrodnye bratya, "the four YU-born brothers"). The percentage of "Paragraph Five" students (or Jews—after the infamous fifth question on the identity form that required a specified nationality, which Jews were in the Soviet Union) at the institute increased. Writers took to appearing at the literary faculty. I remember Konastantin Fedin, Aleksandr Tvardovsky, Ilya Ehrenburg, Mikhail Svetlov (I invited him myself), and the young Stalin Prize-winner Yuri Trifonov. The glorification of the great man by the great came to an end, although in our lectures, as previously, both of his pamphlets—on socialist linguistics and on communist economics—were abundantly quoted.
      I am afraid of introducing a modern-day cynicism into my feelings about those times and distorting the picture. Not one hint of Stalin's abuses had ever been spoken. A lot was perceived as it had been before, although official writer Konstantin Simonov later recalled that they had telephoned him from the Central Committee to ask: "Who gave you permission to write that Stalin will live forever?" God had become a demigod. But a visit to the house where the demigod had lived still seemed unreal.
      Nonetheless, after a couple of days our culture-agent, Nina, informed us—again on the quiet—that the tour had been scheduled and they were going to take us to the "only-just-opened closed museum." The terminology didn't occasion any perplexity, nor did its sense. Naturally a museum would be opened after Stalin's death. After all, there were museums for other great people. It wouldn't be necessary to advertise it: a crowd would have mobbed it straightaway, like at a funeral. And just as natural was her command: "Passports! It's important for everyone to have their passports with them!" Enemies were all around.
      Fluffy snowflakes were falling. Scattering the wet slush, a small bus drove up to the square beside the institute. Its top half was white, the bottom light-blue, and the whole splashed with mud. The driver checked our group pass and counted the seated passengers with a finger. There were twelve of us. The windows were covered by white curtains, but a little could be seen through the cracks. We passed by Kievsky railway station and appeared to be on the Minskoye highway. We turned left off of it, once past Poklonnaya hill, and were immediately in a thick forest. Not a house nor a human could be seen, if you didn't count the militiamen strolling along the sides of the road, accompanying us with their attentive gaze. The snow stopped falling. The short day, a gloomy one to boot, was approaching its early end.
      We hadn't been driving for long. Nobody joked, nobody laughed. We were as solemnly hushed as if we were at a funeral. Unexpectedly the bus turned sharply, and suddenly it was broad daylight again. Everything was lit up by searchlights. The snow around glistened; we could see it like New Years' decoration on the sagging branches of the fir trees. The driver braked. When our eyes had adjusted to the light, it became evident that we were surrounded by officers in State Security uniform. They didn't have to ascertain who we were; they, of course, already knew. They simply began to count heads. Then the gate opened. The bus drove on in and once again came to a standstill.
      Behind us was a fence of about five meters in height, dark green. Inside, at a certain distance from it, was yet another barrier, this one of barbed wire. Alongside the fence ran a narrow asphalt road, illuminated by lamps under black shades. Now you would say right off: a prison-camp zone.
      Once again there were people in uniform around the bus. Two of them stepped into the aisle and gathered up our passports, peering into everyone's face and checking their names against a list. They checked under the seats, which plunged the women of the group into confusion, squeezing their knees together. The checkers went back to their guardroom, and two young men in civilian clothes with indifferent expressions came aboard and sat down at the back. We didn't move; we sat silent, waited. After a certain time, a woman of middle years, I would say sternly beautiful, clambered up the bus steps. She greeted us and spoke words of warning:

      You may not fall even a step behind the rest, you may not photograph anything, you may not write anything down, you may not talk among yourselves. Upon exiting the bus you may not bring with you any bags, bundles, or books. You may not smoke. Men must leave their hats behind on their seats.

      She paused, then nodded to the driver to get going. The crowd of security types parted. Standing in the stairwell, half-turned toward us, the woman's intonation changed to that of a tour-guide.

      You now find yourselves situated on the same territory as the house in which the great leader of all of progressive mankind, Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin, lived, worked, and died. When Comrade Stalin chose this plot of land in Kuntsevo, it was a vacant spot, a barren place. The forest through which we are driving was planted by order of Comrade Stalin.

      This declaration seemed improbable: the bus had been traveling for more than ten minutes (or maybe it just seemed that long) down the clean, narrow asphalt road—on which it would be impossible to pass another vehicle—through a huge, real forest. Age-old pines and firs grew now thick and now thin, but right up to the bus, brushing branches against us on both sides, showering down snow.
      Later I found out that they had purged the entire district of its people, evicting particular categories of populace from the near-lying villages. A quiet, elderly woman traveled alongside an acquaintance of mine once on an airplane in America. It turned out that in the beginning of the 1930s she had been living with her neighbors in the Volynskoye village of Davydkovo. The authorities had come to her place at night, given the family a half-hour to collect their things, helped them load up, and then removed them to Kalinin province.
      "Maybe they were afraid of someone shooting from our village," was that lady's comment on their banishment.
      Meanwhile, the bus slowly moved ahead when our tour-guide continued.

      Here ravines were dug, hills piled up, all by personal order of Comrade Stalin, who loved nature very much. You see those paths through the trees? Whenever snow fell, they would stamp them down by foot, so that he could stroll in the woods.

      Now and again lights could be seen among the trees, illuminating pathways and watering-faucets sticking out of the snow. There had just been a snowfall, and in the woods there really were already-tamped-down paths. For whom? After all, the lover of strolls in the woods had already died last spring. Maybe they just forgot to change the order to the stompers?
      Imperceptibly, a two-story building emerged from the gloom, painted green, with a glassed-in terrace and a courtyard cleared of snow before a typical formal entrance, alongside which the bus came to a halt. We were invited to get out of the bus and stand in one place, without moving. They counted us up again. The bus drove off, and a deathly hush straightaway filled our ears. The house, as it came clear from the explanation of our guide, had been designed by the architect Miron Merzhanov at the personal order of Stalin, and had been built in 1933-34. Some commentary is necessary here.
      Merzhanov built other dachas as well in the Caucasus and the Crimea for the general secretary. As his retreat near Moscow, Stalin had earlier picked out a sumptuous spot for himself in deep woods near the Usovo railway station, and spent his summers there from 1919 until 1932. The estate, complete with gothic-style palace, was called Zubalovo after its former owner, an oil baron by the name of Zubalov. Going by his daughter's testimony, Stalin was nudged into thinking of moving out of the Kremlin by his wife's suicide on November 8, 1932 (he himself adored living in seclusion). But it is thought that another more practical consideration was his desire to detach himself from the remaining party leaders. They all lived together in the Kremlin citadel. He felt like having his own special citadel, so he built one. As to Merzhanov, he was sent to a forced labor camp and returned back in 17 years half-alive.
      The forest around shone with lights. The paths outside the house were carefully cleared, the unwanted snow taken away. To the right of the entrance was a cosy little door. Comrade Stalin wasn't fond of his formal entryway, the guide explained. His car would pull right up to this door, and he would disappear inside it. What was it, anyway, I think to myself now: modesty, a revolutionary habit of secrecy, or a feeling of constant danger? Or maybe just a character trait?
      We looked up at the second story. At first, there hadn't been any second story to the house. There had been a solarium on the roof. But the owner of the house loved the cool of the forest more. The second story was constructed in 1948, recalls his daughter in her book Twenty Letters to a Friend. The superstructure stood there to no purpose, if you don't count a single reception for a Chinese delegation. Our guide explained it to us otherwise:
      "The superstructure (you see, it was smaller than the first story—a house on top of a house) was ordered to be built during the war."
      In it, she said, lived the representatives of the general staff, which I will add now is highly unlikely. Perhaps they did stay overnight when the Germans were on the threshold of Moscow, but it would have been in the bunker, of course. There, in that small building, day and night they mulled over the fate of the country, and later, when they managed to overcome Hitler, the fate of the whole of Europe. Who could say now which of the ideas on the subject were his own and which ones were born in the heads of the attendant generals?
      Twilight was coming on. We were taken around the outside of the house. Outside, along the glassed-in terrace, protected from the frost by bast matting, bushes were formed up in a rank, powdered over with snow. A little further on were cherry trees, pretty, no doubt, when in blossom. From her commentary it became clear that there were roses under the matting. Gardeners looked after them on the instructions of the master of the house. He didn't like to work in the garden himself. But sometimes he would pick up a knife and trim off dead twigs.
      From the opposite side of the house a view opened out over a birch grove—this, too, artificially planted. There were gazebos there. In them were chaises-longues and armchairs. The master would walk from one gazebo to another. Tea would be brought there to him. The guide said:

      Before construction of the house began, they started bringing twenty- to thirty-year-old trees here from Moscow and Smolensk provinces. Right at that moment a great plan for transforming nature in our homeland occurred to Comrade Stalin.

      The house was separated from the birch grove by a narrow gully that looked like a broad ditch with a brook running along the bottom. A bridge with a thick railing had been thrown across the gully. Many years later, I realized that a medieval idea had occurred to the mind of a twentieth-century man. The hill where the dacha was built had been surrounded by a gigantic moat with two bridges flown across it. The moat was filled with water coming from the river Setun, painstakingly guarded all the way from its source to Kuntsevo.
      Across the bridge, passing the birch grove, we came upon some conservatories. Their glass walls and roofs were shining brightly. Inside, bunches of grapes hung from vines. The grapes had been planted under his personal supervision, the wines made according to the master's recommendations. Even in this area he was a specialist.

      The best agronomists, gardeners of the highest qualification, the guide explained simply, work here to bring to life the agricultural ideas of Ivan Michurin and Trofim Lysenko, approved by Comrade Stalin.

      Without doubt they were not only of the highest qualification, but of a definite rank as well. Who else could have been there constantly, inside two circles of guards, Georgian and Russian, without a common language? Who else could have been trusted to grow vegetables and fruits for him? But the guide anyway explained that Stalin liked to eat fresh vegetables from his garden and had given instructions on how to grow them properly.
      From time to time our group came to a halt. The snow would stop crunching underfoot, the guide would fall silent, and a hush would ensue. It pressed against our ears. But maybe it just seemed that way, from nervous tension. After all, it was 1953. The other world, that is, the one beyond the fence, was absent here. Living nature, artificially created, was beautiful, but it was a simulacrum. Life had stopped here in March. Time had died together with the master of the estate. There were neither birds nor squirrels in the trees. An uninhabited island. Neither entry nor exit without an escort standing behind your back. There was a sensation of being an alien from another planet, although ordinary Moscow was somewhere not very far away.
      Suddenly, returning to the house along the forest path, we discovered that we were not alone. Another group, which had just come out of the "museum," was heading towards us. Ahead of them was another guide, the complete double of our own. Behind them were two twin brothers. Between them, a group of writers. I recognized Aleksey Surkov, Mikhail Bubyonnov, Vasily Azhayev, the sister of Vladimir Mayakovsky Ludmila, and next to her the author of the unforgettable poem about the boy hurrying with his present to the Kremlin.
      As soon as we got up to the house, a man in a security-service uniform opened the main door. The guide entered first; the last ones, behind us, were the two in civilian clothes. It was warm inside.
      "Take off your overcoats and hang them on the hooks. Tie those slippers on over your shoes …"
      Ordinary museum-style slippers with laces. If this were today, someone would surely ask if Stalin himself wore such slippers. But at that time the silence was broken only by the rustle of clothing. The sensation of being in a mausoleum.
      Without a coat and in slippers, I glanced around. To the left, straight ahead, and to the right were doors to rooms. In between the doors there was an elevator. Next to it was a bathroom and a toilet. On the elevator panel were four buttons. That meant that there was one more floor above and two floors down. There was a bunker, there or somewhere else, also underground, a government communications nexus. There was no mention of the bunker where Stalin spent the dangerous months of the war in Svetlana Alliluyeva's book either.
      "Upstairs," pronounced the guide, "is a film theater."
      She made no mention of any downstairs. It goes without saying that no one even asked. Nowadays we know that he loved westerns and Chaplin movies, and that he would watch them at night. But most of all he loved filmstrips about himself, which could now be filed under the general heading of "Stalin Shows Himself to the People." The myths about him were composed under his unremitting personal supervision.
      We were taken into a room some twenty meters in length, almost without any furniture, if a large oval table in the middle and a sofa weren't taken into account.

      On the table you can see the newspapers for the first of March, said our usherette. Mail was brought here in the morning and he looked at it himself. You can see the workers' letters about their wholehearted love for their leader and teacher. These newspapers and letters Comrade Stalin never managed to read …

      It goes without saying that the letters were of love. Of devotion. Of readiness to give their lives for him. Letters with prayers and grieving floated down a different river. Only a pure stream flowed into this abode.
      We came back out into the corridor. An ordinary habitation, if one with a huge area. We passed on to the so-called dining room. In the Moscow of that time there were better and more beautiful ones in the houses of academicians, people's artists, Stalin prize-winners. The prize-giver himself lived modestly. Here was a sideboard of light-colored wood, inexpensive. Ordinary dishes inside it. In the middle of the room, there was a table under an orange cloth lampshade with tassels. A sofa with round bolsters and a high back. The ossified style of the Thirties. There was a bowl with apples on the table. On the sideboard there was an open bottle of Borzhomi mineral water and a glass. A not-very-large refrigerator of a familiar shape, one of the first Soviet ones. A not-very-tall bookcase.
      Behind its glass doors were books: of course Marx and Engels, Lenin. Books lay open as examples. In them were the quotations learned by everyone in school, childishly underlined in colored pencil. Did he underline them himself? Or perhaps they were underlined "for the museum?"
      "Here he had his dinner," the guide explained.
      But, in reality, as it turned out later, mostly not here. Incidentally, the kitchen wasn't inside the house. After coming out of the birch grove, the tour-guide had drawn our attention to a long, covered passageway connecting the house to an annex. It held a kitchen and a dining room for his retainers: drivers, guards, waitresses, gardeners, cooks, generals of the guard, stewards of the estate. The master didn't like kitchen smells, it had been explained to us at that point. Did they remind him of his childhood with his cook-mother, which he didn't like to recall? Or did they build it that way to keep the servants at a distance, for his privacy (the English word has to be used, as it doesn't exist in Russian)?
      "It was a rule at the house that the server who brought the food first tasted every dish …"
      The tour guide suddenly blurted this out, leaving off with no explanation, and quickly led us out of the living room to the left, to a room that seemed inappropriate in a small dwelling. The modesty of the master of the house seemed to have somewhat hypertrophied. It was a hall thirty meters long. The opposite end was curved, like in the mansions of the nobility of two centuries before. There were lots of identical windows, tightly covered by heavy white drapes that gathered on rollers up above, just like the ones in all the important institutions in the center of Moscow.
      The lower part of the walls, up to about a meter and a half from the floor, was brown, trimmed with Karelian birch, looking rather stuffy. Under the windowsills there were electrical heating radiators covered by grills of the same birch. Portraits were hanging in the spaces between the windows. These were Politburo members: Georgy Malenkov, Nikolay Bulganin, Lazar Kaganovich, Anastas Mikoyan, Kliment Voroshilov, Viacheslav Molotov, Nikita Khrushchev.
      Later, in his memoirs, Khrushchev would say that that hall was called "the big dining room." In the middle of the hall, down its entire length, was a table. Its surface was covered with dark-green billiard baize. Hard armchairs of light-colored wood were placed tidily around it. Along the walls were armchairs and sofas. There was a colossal carpet covering the whole floor—it seemed like the only really expensive thing there.
      "We are now located in the place where the Politburo held its sessions," the guide solemnly intoned. "Comrade Stalin liked every one of those present to sit just beneath their own portrait."
      Nothing disturbed us twenty-year-olds at the time. Now I read my old notes and my eyes come to a halt. What was going on with these meetings of our leaders at someone's house? What were they, members of an underground organization? Or was the general secretary was too lazy to drive to work? And what about the "sitting under the portrait" ritual?
      In contrast with degenerate succeeding Politburos, at that time we knew them not only by their names but by their faces. Lavrenty Beria had been close to Stalin while he was alive. There was no portrait of Beria. Meaning that they had gotten rid of it—that was the only thing I could imagine at that point in time.
      The tour guide let her hand fall onto the back of a wooden armchair that had been pulled away from the table. This seat was to one side of the table, next to a corner, not at the head of it. On the green baize in front of it lay neatly sharpened and as-yet-unused ordinary and colored pencils alongside a pad of clean, unlined sheets of paper. Beside an ashtray rested a pipe. It was well known that he had stopped smoking several months before his death. But there the pipe lay.
      "Comrade Stalin loved to sit alone at this table and work."
      Just to the left was a book—it wasn't hard to recognize a volume from the collected works of Lenin. On an open page a number of lines had been underscored in red pencil and something written lightly across the margin. The guide read out the inscription. Some significant banality or other. Later one of Stalin's interpreters would note that "He wrote with a cheap schoolboy's pen of those years, dipping it into a spillproof inkwell."
      Behind the chair at the wall there was a cabinet where he kept his papers, envelopes with his salary (which he never spent), and medicines that he took at his own discretion. For instance, he would drink iodine drops in water. Doctors could never treat him, not only because he put them all in prison, but also because instruction, as in all other spheres, had to come from him to medicine, not from doctors to him.
      There was a Chinese embroidery on the wall, a big, bright tiger, as well as cheap reproductions: portraits of Maxim Gorky and Mikhail Sholokhov, and Ilya Repin's "The Zaporozhye Cossacks Write a Letter to the Sultan." Next to them were several large photographs of children. The guide commented:
      "Comrade Stalin liked these pictures of Soviet children in the magazine Ogonyok, and asked for them to be enlarged."
      I read in Ms. Alliluyeva's book that he had never even wanted to see five out of his own eight grandchildren, and it's difficult for me to explain how both these facts can be apprehended at the same time. Either he liked children only in pictures, or, even simpler, there had been no photographs of children here while he was alive.
      To one side of the pulled-out chair there was a small table at the wall. Two telephones sat on it, a white one and a black one. One was an ordinary phone, the other was a hot line. Two chairs. One of them was lower than the other, with short legs.

      Comrade Stalin was not a tall man, the guide said, divulging state secrets. When he spoke on the phone, it was uncomfortable for him to sit in this sort of chair, so he ordered a carpenter to saw off its legs. His secretary sat on the big one.

      That's how, by chance, yesterday's truth came to light. An ordinary chair, whose legs had been sawn off by an ordinary Soviet serf-peasant at the squire's order. This stumpy freak-chair, this dwarf-chair, this midget-chair, normal to begin with and mutilated later, was the Throne of Power, the seat of rulership by two telephones, one white and one black. The black telephone rang with secondary problems, the white one with important ones, and that was that. Or didn't ring at all, when the master dozed off.
      According to the recollections of Yuri Trifonov, Aleksandr Tvardovsky was lying in the Kremlin hospital alongside Aleksandr Poskrebyshev, Stalin's secretary. On one occasion, Poskrebyshev burst into tears and said of his master: "He used to beat me up! He would grab my hair like this and hit my head against the table … " The tsar must have whacked his lackey's head off this very table.
      I just mentioned the Throne of Power. The Russian capital under Peter the Great moved from Moscow to St. Petersburg, and under Lenin back to Moscow. The truth of Stalin's times was that Moscow became just a mythical capital. And the real-but-secret capital of the U.S.S.R. from 1934 to 1953 was the town of Kuntsevo, in the Moscow countryside. Western Kremlinologists should have called themselves Kuntsevologists, or even more precisely, Volynologists. If only they had known about this fact.
      "In this room he spent all of his last years, almost twenty years," Alliluyeva notes in her letters. In the Thirties, when the master was younger, his comrades-in-arms had whooped it up at Nearest. A lot of his Georgian relatives came to visit (before they were wiped out). Shashlik was served, the men played billiards, and everybody danced to the record player that Stalin wound up himself, playing records of his choice and making everyone dance. The Caucasians would sing their doleful songs, and "the master would lead the singing in his high tenor."
      From other sources we know about his famous "suppers" from eleven in the evening until four o'clock in the morning, where he would force drink on everyone to loosen their tongues. Not a word was said at that time by the tour guide about those jolly nighttime dinner parties around that gigantic table that the thoroughly Oriental leader had such respect for when he was younger, nothing about his favorite wine khvanchkara.
      A Central Committee type who managed to come to Stalin's attention in his last two years wrote that age and illness came upon Stalin all of a sudden at the brink of his seventieth year.

      The process of aging became more and more noticeable: his eyes somehow lightened to the color of wet clay, his gaze became less piercing, his gait less firm. In great secrecy his friends told others that, at times, he would get schnockered, as they say, on his favorite Georgian wine.

      Stalin's daughter recalled that next to the big hall was a small one, the "little dining room." It wasn't shown to us, but I remember the door. I don't know where the billiard table that he liked to play on stood—that's a state secret, too. "Comrade Stalin liked folk songs," the guide said, "Russian, Georgian, and the songs of other nations. You can see the record player and his huge collection of records." So for us tourists he liked folk songs, but for himself he liked gypsy songs and Aleksandr Vertinsky, an йmigrй, that "degenerate bourgeois art."
      Here, according to recollections that I read later, he would play his gramophone after a drinking bout and make the Politburo members dance in pairs. From the table where they held their sessions we were taken straightaway to the door next to his workplace. His bedroom. It was a small, square room with a couple of windows letting in dim light through curtains. To the left, there was an old-fashioned, high, and rather broad bed, with a wooden bedstead, tidily covered with a spread. In Russia that bed size is called a "one-and-a-half," narrower than the American double bed. The pillows had been carefully plumped up, one atop another, and covered with a doily in country fashion. Across from the bed was a clothes cupboard. Ordinary shutters, not even carved. They were open. Inside, two thirds of the space was for hangers, and a third held linen-shelves.
      On the hangers in the cupboard, like a mirage, was a service jacket and military overcoat with generalissimo's shoulderboards, trousers with a wide red stripe—the accouterments of a military leader of genius, familiar to an entire generation. The designers had whipped up this unique costume for a single person. The best anonymous tailors had measured his figure, warped with physical deformities, figuring how to disguise his flaws. A gold-embroidery craftswoman had woven the pattern on his tunic. But—there was only one service tunic. He would have had enough clothing for a whole company of generalissimos.
      My hand stretched out, but I couldn't go so far as to touch something. The things were worn, cleaned many times. Next to them were two ordinary dark men's suits, in which we had never seen him, either in photographs or in films. Did he wear them at home alone? while receiving guests? or did he keep them in reserve for a quick flight to Vienna or Zurich? Where had they hidden his snow-white and gold dress uniforms? Stacks of undershirts and drawers, well-washed socks wrapped up into balls, were all laid out tidily on the shelves. At the bottom, two pairs of black boots, glistening with shoe polish and noticeably worn-looking as well. And next to it, at the same wall, another bookcase. Again books by Lenin and Soviet writers. But where was Machiavelli and his other favorites and preceptors?
      I remember that five years before this excursion my school history teacher had said several times that the Leader read 500 pages every day. Where did that figure come from? How could even a 500-page-a-day-reading-genius manage to get anything else done? And here it was that even half a century later the legend was still alive. "He was a voracious reader," a Central Committee official informs us. "The library in his Kremlin working quarters alone, on the evidence of his aides, numbered more than 5,000 volumes, and the one at his dacha in Volynskoye was several times larger." Several times larger, that is, twenty to thirty thousand volumes—why not? But here's your "voracious reader … " Remembering with bewilderment the wretched library that fit into a pair of small bookcases, I wonder about the tastes of this speed-reader, and about the literature awarded his prize in accordance with those tastes.
      We were between the bed and the cupboard in a room as cramped as in a communal apartment. It was pitch dark outside the windows. Here, in his bedroom, were the same institutional white curtains. A black grand piano was in front of them, taking up all the available space. For what reason and when had the piano appeared at Father's house? Svetlana Alliluyeva recollected the piano, but added that she didn't know its origin. A strange forgetfulness. But his daughter did pay attention to the removal of the piano from the big hall to the bedroom, where, in fact, Stalin did not sleep. The woman escorting us then said this:

      The lid is open, as if someone has just played on it … No, Comrade Stalin didn't play piano himself. This grand piano belonged to Comrade Zhdanov. Comrade Stalin liked Comrade Zhdanov very much and liked it when he played. When Zhdanov died, Joseph Vissarionovich had this piano brought here. Those who came to visit here played the piano.

      "Here?" someone blurted.
      "No, not here. The piano was taken out into the hall."
      Therefore the piano belonged to Svetlana's former father-in-law. But where was the accordion that Andrey Zhdanov also loved to play? No, there was no accordion. Meanwhile, the guide was opening a door that we hadn't noticed. It was one more exit—from the bedroom to the glassed-in terrace. Rattan summer-house furniture, wooden planters with earth for flowers, but without flowers. Cold lay over the terrace. Frost had drawn figures on the glass.

      For the last several months when our Leader couldn't walk anymore, he liked to spend his time on this terrace, the guide said. That last winter, despite the frosts, he liked to sit here for long stretches in his sheepskin coat, his hat with earflaps, and felt boots.

      Chilled to the bone, we returned to the bedroom, and from there to the hall. Now the light was striking us from the left part of the building, as you went out of the bedroom. Here, on a yellowish, varnished parquet floor, stood several wooden barrels with palms, and, sticking out catercorner across the floor was a rather everyday sofa bearing no relation to the ones in the meeting hall, with round bolsters and an absurdly high, swollen back that ended in a shelf for statuettes. An ordinary couch. We had a similar one in our room before the war. It was very uncomfortable to sit on. The guide's voice rang out and then fell:
      "On this couch the Great Leader of the Soviet people and all progressive mankind, Comrade Stalin, lay ill and di …"
      The unfinished word hung in the silence. The most genuine of tears filled her eyes. Nina burst into tears, and another of the girls right behind her. Finally the guide collected herself and continued more calmly.
      "On the right you can see the scarlet cushions with the orders and medals awarded to him by the Party and the government."
      She precisely and at length enumerated what kinds of orders, what they were for, and when awarded. Our eyes raced along after her index finger. Along the wall, covering up the fireplace, there were wreaths of paper flowers with green cast-iron leaves: from the Central Committee, from the Council of Ministers, from the Writers' Union and other organizations, as if he were just about to be buried. But students were already being guided around his apartments, allowed to peep into his cupboards. Meaning he had died, after all. But if he was dead, what was the strict guard for? Why were we being watched to make sure none of us went one step out of line? Now I remember that feeling that arose in me then. The feeling of being trapped. We had been brought here. Were we going to get out of here now? They led us to the entry hall and told us to put on our hats and coats.
      "And where is his study?" someone timidly asked.
      No answer was forthcoming. Later I read in Alliluyeva that his study had been designed by the architect. But the house was then rebuilt several times at the master's orders and the study disappeared, since it was unwanted.
      The door was opened for us. We went out into the open air. It was dank and damp. The bus opened its door. The film wound in reverse: the forest road in the blinding searchlights, the checkpoint. The inspection and checking of our documents according to the list. But were the searchlights as blinding when he himself drove up? Or did they turn them off for him? Finally, we drove out onto the highway. A half-hour later they turned us loose at the Kievskaya metro station. We felt an emptiness at heart, and a strange sense of liberation.
      To ground my impressions in some kind of normality, that winter I decided to make a pilgrimage to Kuntsevo one more time, on my own. To find the place and to see at least from the outside, from the woods, how it looked, to remember it better. I shared this intention with a friend, and he told me about a man who had gone there a couple of years before.
      The man headed down the road through the woods, holding his small son's hand. They had managed to go literally several steps in the direction of the forbidden zone when a car drove up quietly and he was invited inside. At his interrogation he was asked how he had found himself on the highway. He answered sincerely that he had heard that Comrade Stalin supposedly passed this way, and he had wanted to show it to his son. The result was ten years in prison for intent to assassinate the Leader.
      "Do you really want to go there?" my friend wondered.
      "But Stalin is dead," I contradicted.
      "You sure understand a lot! He's dead, but his thing lives on."
      To put it in nutshell, I got too frightened to drag myself there and soon forgot about my "intent."
      Stalin's daughter called the Kuntsevo house gloomy and empty. That has to be a subjective impression. It didn't seem that way to me. Bright, spacious, and, given our communal way of life, simply luxurious. Fairy-tale nature all around. So what was actually bothering me then at that time? To this day I can't explain my own feelings. I'll try to put it this way: it was as if I had gone to the theater to see some Shakespeare, but they were putting on a Soviet dramatist Anatoly Sofronov soapy play instead.
      Nowadays, with the recollections of eyewitnesses and publication of materials discovered by historians, we know the state of his health and how he died in better detail. He had high blood pressure, but there was no one around to treat him. Not long before his death he had taken a steam bath, which hadn't done him any good. Khrushchev recalled that the night before his stroke there had been a big drinking bout until six in the morning. And so—sclerosis of the blood vessels, a stroke paralyzing half of his body, and the loss of speech. Later on his daughter wrote "During the second part of the day on March 1, 1953, the servants found my father lying beside the table with the telephones, and demanded that the doctor be summoned forthwith." I wouldn't dare argue, although the word "demanded" from the mouths of servants calls for strong doubt. Only it's curious what our tour guide said about it:
      "He was found on the carpet alongside this couch. They picked him up and put him on the couch."
      He was lying on the floor, a puddle spreading out under him, his eyes popping out, but they wouldn't allow any doctors to see him. They said that he was asleep, but then themselves deliberated on what was to come and how to divide up power. It is possible that he could still hear them but couldn't react. They demanded that he be undressed and taken to another room—and all this without any doctors. The record of his illness was so hush-hush that no one has ever found it. Vlasik, Poskrebyshev, his personal physician Vinogradov—had all been arrested by that moment, supposedly on Stalin's personal orders.
      Flipping through the literature on the subject, I can see a lot of variant readings concerning the house in Kuntsevo, but the true details are important for a deeper understanding of Stalin. We all collect details—every little bit helps. What kind of man was he in reality, alone with himself? His tastes, his habits, his favorite occupations, his mind, his morals, his culture, as reflected in his everyday life, going by the principle of "the style is the man"? After all, this was reflected in his decisions, decisions that the whole world waited on. Describing this visit, I tried to separate what I saw with my own eyes from what I had heard and read. I noted my rough impressions in my diary that winter. Now it's necessary to add something.
      "The formula-phrase 'Stalin is in the Kremlin' was made up by someone unknown," Ms. Alliluyeva wrote. We know who made it up, I can tell you that with certainty. Of course, he himself thought it up. This was an integral part of the great myth of government. Try to exchange that with the formula "Stalin is in Kuntsevo"—and there is no myth. But then the main myth-holder dies. Still, the mythocracy remains. The idea for a museum came up.
      In her own words, his daughter was in this house in December of 1952, on her father's birthday. Later she recalled that her father talked to her on the phone in January or in February of 1953. After that she was called several hours before his death, when he was already unconscious. Evidently she communicated with him anyway, although in some strange fashion. Judging by a published letter of hers, the daughter couldn't just go see her father whenever she wanted. In the letter she asks permission to come to his place with her children for a two-day holiday.
      In her recollections, Alliluyeva writes an untruth, that she was persecuted after her father's death. By resolution of the Council of Ministers, Stalin's house was assigned to her "with services" and an "allowance" of 4,000 rubles per month. While describing her father as a misanthrope, Alliluyeva forgot to mention one small detail: a house had been built for her not far away from Stalin's own. She liked to stay overnight in it whenever she was around during her father's lifetime.
      Nothing was mentioned to us about her house, but an eyewitness who had been in it told how there were three or four bright rooms, comfort, and peace. Alliluyeva refused the "services," but another dacha free of charge and a car with a personal driver remained assigned to her. Stalin's daughter considered that she achieved everything thanks to her personal capabilities, and forty years later on justified her father with all her might in her last book, blaming his henchmen and the Party as a whole. However, the offspring of the characters surrounding Stalin and the celebrities who flourished under the sun of Stalin's constitution are all singing the same old song today.
      Svetlana Alliluyeva remembers an important detail.

      They were going to open a museum here, similar to the one in the Lenin Hills. But then the 12th Party Congress followed, after which, of course, the idea of a museum wouldn't have come into anybody's head.

      I was at that museum (and not just me) more than two years before the aforementioned party congress. In the gap between Stalin's death and the opening of the museum the following took place.
      On the second day after Stalin's death, Alliluyeva recalled, Beria ordered everyone out of the area of the house. They at once began to load up and cart away the furniture and things to a Ministry of State Security warehouse. The causes of Stalin's death still remain a mystery, but this isn't the place to discuss that. But if Beria had to liquidate everything associated with his master in such a hurry, a suspicion of his complicity in the general secretary's death arises. Maybe Beria, I should ask, intended to move into that estate from his house at the corner of Sadovo-Kudrinskaya and Kachalova Streets, next door to the Chekhov museum?
      The servants were all told that they were to keep silent about the dacha, as if it had never existed at all. The official version announced in the press has remained mythological up till now: Stalin died "in his apartment in the Kremlin." In an article published 35 years later, Alliluyeva added: "This was done so that none of the dacha servants could complain."13 But, come on, this isn't even a little bit serious—who would be afraid of servants' complaints? They could be ground to dust, anyway.
      Some of the ones who had lived there with Stalin for twenty years had nowhere to take themselves off to. A couple of them shot themselves. Valechka, that is, Valentina Istomina, his so-called housekeeper, and in reality his devoted concubine, whom he trusted to taste all his food and sleep with him, remained alive, but they had her hidden away somewhere.
      After Beria's removal from power the command was suddenly given to bring everything back, to restore the house of Comrade Stalin exactly as it had been.
      At the end of the Sixties, I met a woman who had been a museum employee. She told me how in autumn of that memorable 1953 she had been given a call and invited to the reception room of the Lubyanka. The woman had said farewell to her husband and children, grabbed a little bag with some zwieback, and left.
      She was received by an elderly man in a major's uniform. After checking her documents, he rather formally asked her to accompany him, as he expressed it, to "a certain place," where "we need your consultation." She was taken to Kuntsevo. The state-security major explained what the matter was:
      "There has been a decision to open a museum in this house. I was with Stalin all my life, and now everything is as it was when he was here. Take a look around, please. Can it be opened to the public in this state?"
      She was shown around the house. She counted sixteen rooms (we hadn't been shown all of them). There were couches in all of them. On every couch lay a Caucasian cloak.
      "But where did he sleep?" she asked.
      His bodyguard answered simply:

      Nobody knew in what room he slept, or when—day or night, we just had to guess. We weren't allowed to bother him. He slept with his clothes on. He would lock his door from the inside or just latch the door chain. If the servants knew where he was, they would pass food to him through the crack. But is that important at all?

      "This is going to be his personal museum-house," the curator-woman explained.

      In it, everything is supposed to be set out scientifically, so that it's clear to visitors where his study is, where his bedroom is, and so on. But here it seems that all the rooms are identical. For instance, the question will surely occur to visitors 'Why did he sleep in different places?' And the tour guides should be able to explain why.

      The major listened to her attentively and asked:
      "Could you set out all your complaints on paper?"
      "I have absolutely no complaints at all," said the curator, turning cold.
      "You just asked and I answered."
      "So, just set them out for my report to the leadership …"
      "Well, were there any portraits there?" I asked the woman.
      "What portraits?"
      "Politburo members."
      "No, there definitely were no portraits."
      Neither are the portraits mentioned by the author of Twenty Letters to a Friend. Within several days the museum had started receiving visitors. Evidently, they were in a hurry to execute the order and had hurriedly locked up all the superfluous rooms. Whose idea was it for a museum? What was its purpose? Maybe it was just ritual inertia. Why did they hang up the Politburo portraits? To my way of thinking, when handing out instructions for opening the museum, the leader's comrades-in-arms were thinking not so much about his glory as about themselves. The demigod became a hemi-demigod, and the mythocracy labored on. The throne with its sawn-off legs was empty, but his drinking buddies remained right there in the cast of characters around it. And who it was who would occupy it was unclear. Not a single one of them would have refused it. But the house-of-cards palace was trembling and about to collapse in the wind. The courtiers were clinging to the skirts of the myth-holder's overcoat as if hanging on for dear life, trying not to get blown away themselves, to stay at the seat of power.
      Even after his death the master's house remained the abode of a fearsome man who all of his life was afraid and who made his fear universal. But equally he made universal his puritanism, his Machiavellianism, his tastes. His Kuntsevo horizon became the horizon of the whole country, its barbed wire ensnaring everyone.
      Stalin was completely capable of conducting sessions of the Politburo with their portraits instead of them. The portraits could have as actively expressed their points of view as their originals. But why would he want to look for whole days at a stretch at portraits of those whom he deeply despised and used as lackeys? Today it's clear to me: his successors themselves ordered their images to be hung in the hall and made up the legend about how the Great Leader had sat them under their own portraits. It's what Stalin had done before them: in photographs he always appeared, in hindsight, to be an appendage of Lenin's. That's how the Politburo members became the possessors of the general secretary's scepter.
      Undoubtedly they wanted the power and the homage that he had raked in with his mighty hand. That's exactly why the best writers with their high-ranking secretaryships were the first to turn up at the museum (we students were allowed in after them through influence in high places). The trusty writers were supposed to continue the old tradition of doxology, but with new names.
      The writer that I mentioned at the beginning, for instance, was waiting until the period of personal modesty of the new leader was over, and, as soon as an opportunity arose, he readjusted his poem about the little boy to have him now bring his present to Comrade Khrushchev at the Kremlin. He didn't succeed in republishing the poem: Khrushchev was replaced by the next leader. It was necessary to wait out the next period of "collective leadership." This talented writer wasn't put out by this and reworked the poem yet another time. The boy was going to the Kremlin to see Comrade Brezhnev. But the poem once again had no luck. The aged general secretaries began to succeed one another at such a pace that even the most brilliant of poets wouldn't have been able to keep up with the alterations. I am far from making up this story about my colleague. If a suitable situation arises in Russia, the public will be satisfied that that I'm not joking.
      I'm saying this because the dwelling-places of our leaders still remain a mystery to this day. But now everybody knows that they don't live in the Kremlin. Although certain of them have their chambers there, as the writer Boris Balter used to say, in case of popular unrest. I was thinking about this while I was wandering around the White House on a tour of Washington, which seems to be easier to get into than into some elite restaurant, say. And everything inside the White House has frequently been described and photographed—you can even buy postcards showing everything there.
      I don't know how many people in all and of what social strata managed to visit the estate at Kuntsevo. I would guess not a lot. I heard that the museum had been shut down several days after our visit. It was shut with the same secrecy that it had been opened with. It goes without saying that no announcement was ever made about it, and that the 20th Congress had nothing to say about it. The Congress was in session during the turbulent days when Stalin's milieu still didn't know whether to sing "Suliko" (his favorite Georgian folksong) or stomp on his ashes. They were inclined toward the latter. However, the museum could have served either of these two purposes. And, if you like, the second was lots better. But more about this later.
      "There came a moment when they suddenly decided at the top to hand over the estate for a model orphanage," the lawyer Leonid Oyrikh told me. "The party stalwart Aleksandr Perov was appointed principal. Before that he had been responsible for the management of a resort on the premises. I was on friendly terms with him. It was thanks to him that I got a chance to see Stalin's dacha."
      "Was there furniture there?"

      No, everything had been taken out of the house, the guards discharged, even the lights had been cut off—they'd left just a watchman. Perov was really proud of his new place of work, his eyes were even burning. He put me and my wife into his Pobeda and took us off to see Stalin's dacha. I remember that we left the car at the gates, passed through two fences, between them German shepherds running around. We walked around the house and along the paths by flashlight. The rooms were empty. I remember that there were two barbecues in the garden: shashlyk for the Leader was cooked on them. At that time Perov had been told to assemble the furniture for the orphanage. It was ordered from a factory in Riga, and they had already started shipping the furniture in.

      "But surely they never opened any sort of orphanage?"
      "Two months later the higher authorities changed their mind, and the Kremlin household administration confiscated the keys from Perov."
      Thus the new leaders still hadn't resolved the dilemma of what to do with Stalin's house. Why did neither Khrushchev nor any of them move to Stalin's ostentatious dacha? Because it wasn't an easy thing to do. Their mortal fear clung to the place. Besides, they all looked kind of chintzy against the Master's backdrop. They weren't ashamed of besmirching their own reputations—those had been muddied long ago. Neither were they afraid of public opinion. Evidently they were just uncomfortable about becoming a laughing-stock in the eyes of their colleagues.
      For the leaders of the new wave, Stalin's house had achieved moral obsolescence, and simply seemed too small. Having seen the West, all of them wanted comforts of a more contemporary sort. Modesty in private life and the back-packing asceticism of terrorists, who always had to be ready to throw on their overcoats and slip off into the night, had become unnecessary. Not for them the drinking bout with dancing to the gramophone: imposing receptions in furs and fancy dress required a different architecture. The dachas of succeeding leaders were situated in inviolate woods farther from the center of town.
      And the town of Kuntsevo with its vanished village of Volynskoye, visited by Gogol, and the river Setun, running along the foot of Voznesensky Forest, and the ancient village of Ochakovo, the possession of the 18th century scholar and writer Mikhail Kheraskov, and a row of adjoining villages—in a word, these ancient environs, including Stalin's estate, were all joined up to the city of Moscow by a stroke of Khrushchev's pen.
      In the years after Stalin, broad Minskaya Street cut across the Minskoye highway (formerly the Mozhayskoye highway), built on the bones of hundreds of thousands of prisoners. The highway at that point was called Marshal Grechko Prospect, but possibly has been renamed again. At one point Minskaya Street was called Khrushchev highway by the local inhabitants. This new street cut across yet another deserted road going through the forest along Poklonnaya hill to Stalin's estate. The forest remained, but new construction, forbidden in the Master's time, was springing up all around.
      The standardized boxes of identical buildings filled the Ochakovskaya district and the floodplain of the Setun, demonstrating the cheerless solemnity of such town planning, against the background of which even the Stalin Renaissance style looks like masterwork. In the forest on the other side of the road Kalinin's dacha is preserved, where important guests used to come, the leaders of the fraternal communist parties. They were even shown the "Kuntsevo museum" in confidence.
      I found myself once again on the territory of the estate in 1976, coming on a visit to a sick journalist friend. He lay in a ward of a building where Stalin's guards had formerly been quartered. Now a multistory therapeutic department for Hospital No.1 of the Fourth Directorate of the Ministry of Health, the Kremlin branch, had been constructed there. The bus stop at the former nine-kilometer marker on Minskoye highway is modestly called "First Hospital." It isn't the most ostentatious of hospitals, although not for mere mortals. In the same ward as my friend, who had gotten there only by pulling strings, lay other man: the deputy of some ministry or other, the son of an executive member of the Central Committee, and the personal chauffeur of Blatov, Brezhnev's assistant—there you go, a national table of ranks.
      Blatov's chauffeur was complaining about how the wedding party for his boss's daughter had brought on his stomach ulcer. For the party Blatov had been sent parcels from regional committee secretaries all over the country. For two weeks, the chauffeur had been dashing around between railway stations and hotels like someone possessed. And of course he had to have a drink with everybody. So his ulcer started acting up again.
      The deputy minister related how the people at the top were going to get rid of all the Jews in the country. The method—expelling them all, all at once—wouldn't suit: first they had to prepare for their replacement at all of the leading branches of culture and science. And at the same time let go the superfluous Jews and hang on to the rest until their Russian replacements were ready. As the evening came on, conversation in the ward died down. The crackle of radios could be heard. All the chauffeurs and ministers were pulling out shortwave radio receivers from underneath their pillows and tuning in to the Voice of America Broadcasting in Russian.
      I stepped out of the former guardhouse and ambled toward the forest. A bridge stretched across the gullies, but further on the road was cut off by the high fence so memorable from my student years. By moving the fence, they had somehow foreshortened the estate. I remembered one of the conversations in the hospital (lying in bed next to Stalin's house, the patient now and then would return to that sainted theme). The son of the Central Committee executive related that, before important Party events, they would lodge the people who composed, massaged, and agreed the texts of reports for the leadership in Stalin's house. The atmosphere contributed a lot to their creative juices.
      Ten years further on I went to see an acquaintance at a home for retired filmmakers that had been built alongside that same forest. They were allowed to walk on the outskirts of the park, but not, of course, as far as the secret abode. A new reinforced-concrete fence had been raised around it, but inside, it was said, everything stood as it had before. And that's right. What if it was suddenly needed again? We'll outwait the elements, and then we'll see what to do with this national shrine.
      If it were up to me, I would reopen the Stalin museum in Kuntsevo right now. True or false, it doesn't matter. The falser it is, however paradoxical, the more real it is. A museum to a man not so much a modest misanthrope as a primitive one. A national Communist theme park. A museum to the Politburo, that is, to all of them, the wielders of power in this wretched country. A museum to the triumph and mediocrity of the Soviet ideology. A museum subordinate, unlike all others, not to the Ministry of Culture, but to a corresponding department of the Lubyanka.
      It would be better, of course, to secure the permission of the master of the house. After all, it is his private property. I don't know if he has forgiven us for visiting him at the pleasure of Politburo but without any invitation from him. And what if his shade, wandering at night along the pathways tamped down in the snow, ordered his uninvited guests dealt with?

Translated by Thomas Moore

Edwin Mellen Publishers