Joe Stalin & Khrushchev

 

Khrushchev & Stalin

Nikita Khrushchev survived the Stalinist era and was a close friend of Lavrentiy Beria. Khrushchev certainly had plenty of blood on his hands and had signed many death warrants, but he managed to distance himself from it, by basically blaming it all on Joe Stalin. Khrushchev did say that all those in Stalin's inner circle knew that they were temporary men.

I believe many of them dreaded getting an invite to dinner at Stalin's dacha at Kuntsevo. These dinners went on into the early hours and there was forced binge-drinking. Stalin intentionally got his inner circle drunk to make them talkative and exposed. These dinners were a form of political control.

Stalin seems to have been close to Sergei Kirov and was rather upset, when he heard about his death. But Kirov's popularity within the party certainly rankled Stalin. It was rumoured that Stalin had Kirov bumped off but that has never been proved. The man that shot Kirov appears to have been a disgruntled party member who had an axe to grind.

For most of his time, Stalin was the boss but he wasn't the head of state or the Russian President. He ran things as the General Secretary of the party from a room in the Kremlin known as the Little Corner. He was a tyrant but he was also a complicated man. He would send money to old friends, give lifts to people standing in the rain at a bus shelter while he was driving home to his dacha, and pose for photographs with holiday makers in Sochi, where he had a holiday home. He once asked his doctor if he read the Russian newspapers, 'Izvestia' and 'Pravada'. The doctor told him that he did and Stalin told him there was no truth in either newspaper. 

Artem Mkoyan, the brother of the Soviet minister, Anastas Mikoyan, recalled being at Stalin's dacha in Sochi. He had an angina attack and went to bed early. He said he felt somebody tucking him in and when he looked up it was Joe Stalin.