It's Hard Out There For An Apparatchik

What was it like to be one of Stalin's henchmen? Did Khrushchev, Beria, Malenkov, Kaganovich, Molotov, Zhdanov, and the others actually enjoy being in power? In the Soviet Union it was always better to be in power than out of power, but life for the oligarchs wasn't all vodka and caviar. The 1990 documentary, I Worked for Stalin: Songs of the Oligarchs, interviews the children of many of Stalin's closest political allies to explain why.

The advantages to being in power were clear enough. The oligarchs received something much better than a large salary. Rather, they received direct and therefore almost unlimited subsidies from the state treasury. They also enjoyed a number of very visible perks in a politically stratified country. One aging official, deputy to Zhdanov, remembers riding around Moscow in a splendid car. Being driven in a certain type of car meant nobody in town would dare to stop you. You were recognized immediately as a member of a very privileged class. Oligarchs had permission to go wherever they wanted, which wasn't of course the case for most ordinary Russians, who required passes to move about the country and were subject to police searches.

The chief benefit of belonging to Stalin's group of chief political advisers was of course power. While Stalin was always in charge, and was called "the master" in recognition of this fact, individual oligarchs often participated in the decision-making process, or could at least promote allies to key political positions, or block the advancement of potential enemies.

The flip-side of power was the risk of losing that power at a moment's notice. During the 1930s, vast sections of the Communist Party were exiled, imprisoned, or shot. In fact, one put one's own family members in harm's way by blindly devoting oneself to Stalin's whims. As the film reminds one, Molotov's wife was imprisoned at one point, as was another Politburo member's sister. Another peril of the job was being forced to attend to an isolated, elderly, and paranoid Stalin's dull dinner parties. At the end of Stalin's life, each of the oligarchs was forced to eat, drink, and watch movies with Stalin into the wee hours of the night to preserve one's political position.

This is the principle theme of the film. The oligarchs worked very hard--sometimes 17 hours a day, sometimes without vacations, and sometimes sleeping at the office--but even hard work could not guarantee one's political future. In fact, Stalin distrusted even his closest colleagues. At the end of his life, he would specifically dis-invite one member of the Politburo to his nightly gatherings. The result of Stalin's distrust was a state of perpetual tension. As his son remembers, Malenkov stood to take Stalin's calls, even though he couldn't be seen. He also made sure never to mention any individual even at home, since the "walls had ears" as every Soviet official knew. In fact, the secret police were never far behind the oligarchs. Even the children were followed by the GPU.

In the end, Stalin's death created one final challenge for his cronies. Everyone was at risk in the new and radically unstable political situation. Beria, who controlled the local guards, frightened his erstwhile comrades most of all, but was famously outflanked by the man this film claims was his own protegee, Nikita Khrushchev. In the end, most of the oligarchs experienced an ignominious political end, although only Beria was executed outright. Malenkov found himself demoted and exiled to extremely remote posts in Eastern Russia. Perhaps, as his son asserts, he was was even killed by secret police posing as doctors.

One political heavyweight who was interviewed in the film sums up the ambiguous testimony of this political group. This man, although sent to prison on trumped up charges, still believed that many of his disgraced colleagues--Yezhov for example--had actually been foreign spies, as the Stalinist legal system so often asserted. And, despite the fact that he himself eventually wound up beyond bars and without friends after years of political service, he felt good about the hard work he had done on behalf of the Soviet Union. Since when, he must have asked himself over and over again over the long years of political isolation, can hard work ever be a bad thing?

Journey to the Heart of Shabbiness

I’ve never been a fan of travel writing. It seems so self-indulgent, impressionistic, essentialist, and random. Travel writing is as annoying to me, as say, blogging is to other people. Apologies to all of you. I remember reading Paul Theroux’s musings as he worked his way across Mexico, down through Central America, across the Panamanian isthmus, across the Andes, and down to Patagonia, all by way of a train. I felt the journey to be as long and tedious as he must have felt it to be, despite his attempt to cover up the vicissitudes of South American train travel with literary allusion and cleverness.

Almost by definition, the travel writer feels unconstrained by organizational or thematic demands. He or she can write as much on any particular topic as seems necessary and then move on whenever necessary. It’s all a matter of whim and caprice. The writer isn’t even constrained by the reality of what one sees: he or she can refer to his or her own subjective perceptions of a place, or reach back into the past for previous iterations of the locale. You’re thinking that this blog is worse: it doesn’t even organize content into whole chapters. You’re also thinking that it’s not really possible to hate travel writing. It’s easy to digest, escapist, exotic, and colorful. Historians have even fallen in love with the genre, for in the context of history the travel writer’s biases, uninformed opinions, xenophobic ruminations, shallow attempts to sympathize with the “natives,” and misconceptions, become fodder for rich historical and textual analysis. Even so, I retain my position. Travel writing is solipsistic. The traveller seems to end up knowing less than the person who hasn't travelled. He certainly knows less than the people upon whom he bestows his passing appraisals.

It’s not surprising then that I didn’t warm up to Ryszard Kapuscinski’s Imperium, a record of his journeys through the disintegrating Soviet empire. The critics rave about the book. They love Kapuscinsky’s perspicacity, linguistic acumen, and cultural knowledge. And I must admit that the book has some merits. It takes you through a variety of Soviet republics and regions, reminding readers that the Soviet Union and Russia are not synonymous terms. One minute you’re in the Caucasus, the next in Ukraine, the next you’re in the Muslim South, the next in polar Siberia, the next in what used to be Poland. And you do learn something about the diversity of Soviet experience. You encounter separatism, memories of Beria’s arrest and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the Khrushchev-inspired Virgin Lands ecological disaster, the disappearance of the Astral Sea, oil in Baku, Jewish life, and so much more.

If there is one unifying theme to Kapuscinsky’s travels, it is that of Soviet shabbiness. The planes don’t run on schedule, passengers wait for days on end at the airport, everybody can be bribed, housing stock is in poor condition and extremely limited, a low level fear of the authorities pervades every aspect of existence, resignation characterizes the dominate mood of the masses, etc. In this larger theme of a Soviet reality rooted in blandness and tediousness and creeping corruption, the author makes the best of a poor genre.