CLOSE-UP VIEW OF A TINY TYRANT
His strange
lifestyle. . .His daughter’s descriptions.. . The room where he signed the decree which was a death warrant for
tens of thousands of his countrymen.. . A continental bloodbath taking place
while he played billiards “to keep fit”. His peculiar power, enabling him to
earn the loyalty of people whose parents he had ordered killed….
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WELCOME TO SOCHI.
This is the modern Customs House - with the Red Star on its spire - marking the home of Stalin - and the gateway to the Winter Olympics. It is the harbopur serving the most popular summer resort of Russia.
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Sochi was
our furthest port of call, just a stone’s throw from the troubled state of
Georgia where Stalin was born.
Russia
wrested the littoral below the Caucus from the Turks and the mountaineering tribes
of the Ottoman Empire less than 110 years ago. They named it Sochi, and the
Tsar’s nobles instantly occupied it as a refuge from “the frosty blasts of
freezing winds and shivering blizzards” that sweep across the rest of Russia. Later, Joseph Stalin chose Sochi as his “summer
capital” to which he could retreat and ponder his next paranoid plot.
Conversely,
Russia’s “summer capital” of sub-tropical comfort is due to host the Winter
Olympic Games in 2014. They will be
staged immediately above the resort on the slopes of the Caucasus Mountains.
Sochi has
been a Russian favourite from the day they gave it its new name, for its
climate is not only benign, it is perfect for growing tea - Russia’s favourite
non-alcoholic beverage.
Sochi is a
favourite, too, of Vladimir Putin, ex-President and Prime Minister of Russia.
Investments are
pouring into this seaside health resort, transforming it into a flourishing 21st
century city. Property in some of its areas is more expensive than in Moscow.
It has only half a million residents, but more than three million Russian
tourists visit it each year, spreading themselves along 145 miles of the
littoral, making Sochi “the longest city in Europe”. (Recently our little South African sea-side resort of Hermanus
renamed its municipality Overstrand and spread about 150 kilometres east
and west along the tip of Africa, taking in villages from False Bay to beyond
Walker Bay, thus allowing it the dubious claim of being “the longest village in
the world” ).
Though
officialdom tends to hush it up, Sochi’s most famous (or infamous) claim is
that is the place of Stalin’s favourite dacha.
He had numbers of them across the USSR, but this one in the extreme
south was his second home. It was the source of countless millions of
deaths.
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We arrived
at its gates on a calm, sunny day. The only darkness was the dacha’s forbidding
entrance, painted in its original camouflage-green in a shadowed forest. Stalin
first came here for his health in 1925, staying in the villa of a rich citizen
– a economic circumstance that irritated him, until he arranged for the State
to buy it and refurbish it for him in 1937. |
 Gateway to Stalin's massively guarded dacha complex
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Seventy years later you can stroll
passed the long double-storied line of bodyguard quarters and guestrooms to
Stalin’s dark-panelled home which has been preserved just as he used it.
You will
see in the main room a waxwork Stalin sitting at his desk. The desk, made of
oak, is the original one: low, small and bearing the silver writing-set
presented to him by Mao Tse Tung.
Stalin’s
slight frame, only 1.67m high, is able to dominate the room, despite the big
map spread across the wall behind him. Only when I saw the mannequin model of
him did I appreciate precisely how tiny
the great dictator was – quite contrary to the photos and images of him that
still exist.
Much of his
work room is empty, for it was also used as his private cinema. ‘Private’ meant that no-one, including
family, was allowed to enter while he was watching movies. (There was a special
cinema hall in another wing, for when he chose to entertain guests).
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 Entrance to Stalin's private quarters
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“He loved
films, he enjoyed them as private entertainment, as well as seeing them as one
of the great tools in making propaganda.
He loved Charlie Chaplin! But he always sat alone on the sofa in his
room when watching films. He did not allow anyone to see any personal emotion,”
said our guide. “Every night he would sleep on the sofa – or
on that cot there, next to his desk. |
“He had a
damaged hand since childhood, and he would not allow anyone except his daughter
to attend his medical treatments or bathing sessions. And he had a secret route
to his own pavilion beside the warm springs.”
His only daughter was 84 years old in 2007. She left Russia after he died,
deliberately cutting all ties with her homeland. After living in London, Germany
and elsewhere, she finally settled in New York. She is
quoted (in an English translation made in Sochi) as saying of her father: “I had such
a feeling, that I was standing at a great mountain feet, and he was on its top.
You cry something there . . .but just a few words fly so far. And from there
also, just separate words reach you, so you can’t tell everything, talking like
that, can’t have a good long talk.
Sometimes we walked. It was easier. . .”
Stalin had
few if any real friends, it seems. The photos on display show only close
family, visiting politicians – and bodyguards relaxing at his picnics in “the
Green Grove” surrounding his dacha. His constant companion at Sochi was a local
electrician who helped him win at billiards. “The tradesman was permitted to
win, but not too highly. . . and not too blatantly. Stalin didn’t tolerate
anyone but his partner ever to beat him.”
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However, if
he didn’t have friends, he did have millions of loyal admirers in Russia;
despite his treachery, his paranoia and his pathological violence.
Unlike
Hitler - his greatest enemy and fellow dictator – Stalin has not been disowned
and entirely rejected by his country. His preserved dacha is a reminder of
this, and even immediately after perestroika in the 1980s when his
reputation was at its lowest, the Russian attitude to a man whom many believe
was history’s greatest killer, was ambivalent. |
 A favourite and flattering painting of the dictator
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A beguiling
little booklet in English, advertising the “Health Resort Zelenaya Roscha
(‘The Green Grove’)” illustrated
this ambivalence – even before Putin’s Government published in November 2007,
proclamations that seem to attempt to restore Stalin’s place in the pantheon of
Russian Heroes of the People.
Under the
heading ‘Dictator and Man’, the Health Resort’s pamphlet about the dacha
tiptoes its way around Stalin thus:
“As people say, time puts
everything to its places. So, concerning Josef Stalin it has
not done yet.
In the years of perestroika in Sochi
Art Museum hosted an art exhibition devoted to
Stalin's prisons. The pictures were mediocre, but it
seamed that there were no one indifferent in the hall. In
the book of wishes and references diametrically
opposite opinions about Josef Stalin came into collision.
Some wrote about their hatred to the
dictator, because they had lost their relatives
in exiles. The others were indignant with talking slanderously about the person, who managed to lead us to Victory over the fascism. One veteran
just wrote two numbers of five figures — the first was his personal
number in Buhenvald, the second — in Russian prison, in Kolima.
But at the
same page, by red ink was written a famous
quotation of Winston Cherchil, that Stalin took Russia with wooden plough, but
left with atomic weapon. And nothing
could be said against that to any author of such contrary opinions”
At
the same time, the English-language pamphlet does not attempt to rewrite
history . . . as the Kremlin may be doing as I pen this.
Dealing
with the notorious era of terror set off by Stalin in 1937, the Health Resort’s
pamphlet states:
“Not so long ago contemporary
investigators cited two numbers, showing clearly the whole horror of that
terrible time. In 1936 in Soviet Union, 1023 death sentences were
convicted. In 1937 – the number
increased to 350 thousands.
Can you feel how cheaper human’s life
became.
Millions of people were sent to
prison. That was the price of a short
telegram, sent from Sochi to Moscow.”
In 2007, two American writers summed up Stalin’s iron
rule more succinctly:
“He (Stalin)
sent 18 million people, mostly innocent, to the Gulags and, through firing
squads and mass starvation, killed perhaps 20 million people.”
Yet, despite perestroika and all the revelations by Russian
historians in the past 20 years, “Stalin was one of the most popular rulers of
this country, and older people think joyously of him and of the Motherland,” we
were told.
Our informant had a personal, strange story to tell.
“My grandfather worked in a publishing house, and had
a dream of translating some satirical books for Russians to read. A colleague
reported him to the authorities. Grandfather was arrested in the night, and
sent to Siberia. My father woke up to find he had disappeared. Grandfather was
locked up for seven years. . . But we never knew what happened. Nobody ever
told us the truth."
Her grandfather, it seems, walked out of his Siberian
camp. . . never to be seen again.
She told us of a a friend of the family who was
imprisoned for ten years without a trial. When he was released, the
Nazis were attacking Moscow, and he became devoted to Stalin’s regime.
Nowadays, she said, young Russians were hardly interested
in politics.
“My son thinks times like those will never come
again. . . but many middle-aged people think back with longing. It was easy to
live under the regime. Under perestroika, it was difficult. For old people, it is still sometimes very hard.
The price of bread keeps rising, and the pensions are now too small.
“Under the
regime, everyone was silent, for fear of being reported for something. Today
the old people still stay silent on political issues.
‘There is my diary. And when I am dead you can read
it,” they say.
We were silent ourselves as we left Stalin’s last
home to return our own temporary, but luxurious freewheeling home on the ocean.
Sochi town-centre, filled with luxury and modern buildings, also seemed a quite
different world to the one we had stumbled on behind the walls of Stalin’s
dacha.
See ‘mass
murderer’ [[[Or whatever I’m going to call
the article. . . .Story of Stalin still to be written for Biog. Section]]].
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