A sea of vodka, the same music over and over again, no women, rude jokes and a good chance to say goodbye to life after one wrong word. It is impossible not to come, drink - terrible, not drink - even worse ...
“Stalin filled our glasses and put the record on, it was a lovely Georgian folk song, but played by him again and again, it quickly lost its charm. Stalin drank glasses one by one, and after a while he began to dance. It was a disgusting sight, and the more our host drank, the scarier he looked. He burst out laughing as he thrashed around the cabin and tapped completely out of time. The most terrifying thing was that, despite the alcoholic beverages, Stalin watched my reaction all the time. "
Aino Kuusinen's impressions of a vacation cruise with Stalin on the Black Sea in the summer of 1926 perfectly illustrate the party specificity of Stalin, which was supposed to grow only with psychopathic intensity with age. It is worth adding that the unfortunate Finka will not pass Stalin's "drunken exam" and will spend 16 years in a labor camp. Her husband, Otto, must have had a lot more fun on the boat - in the future the generalissimo will see him as the ruler of all communist Finland.
In the Soviet Union, a strong head can help make a career. Otto Kuusinen signing a collaboration pact with the Soviets in 1939 on the right side of the photo.
Compulsion to drink and dance
One of the most distinctive features of Stalin's libations was the brutal compulsion of extreme drunkenness. "Why aren't you drinking?!?" , the completely flooded dictator attacked his second wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, during a ceremonial banquet in the Kremlin on the occasion of the 15th anniversary of the revolution.
When his spouse explained to him that she always felt terrible in the morning when she drank too much, the furious Stalin threw a lit cigarette at her and a jacket. Offended Nadezhda, saving the remnants of her dignity, left the ceremony, thus condemning herself - the next morning she was found dead in bed, with a gun in her hand (hence the official version about suicide).
The second obligatory point of each event was dancing - no matter if you can do it or not, everyone is obliged to dance, or at least imitate a dance. Nikita Khrushchev recalls:
everyone danced (...) I never moved my legs, I dance like a cow on ice, but I also danced (...) Then Svetlanka appeared [Stalin's daughter] ... Stalin immediately demanded that she dance. Then she got tired, I could barely, scarcely move. Stalin was already swaying on his feet and saying:Come on, Svetlanka, dance! And she:I was already dancing, Papa, I got tired. But Stalin grabbed her by the hair with a full handful (...) and pulled, tugged and tugged.
The article was inspired by Joshua Rubenstein's book "The Last Days of Stalin", which tells about the last months of the dictator (Prószyński i S-ka Publishing House).
Parties only with work buddies
In the last years of his life, Stalin became an extremely lonely person. He managed to directly or indirectly contribute to the deaths of both wives, son Yakov died in a German camp (the dictator did not take advantage of the German proposal to exchange high-ranking prisoners), Yakov's stepbrother, Vasily, fell to the bottom of alcoholism, and Svetlana's daughter, for understandable reasons, preferred to avoid aggressive father.
So, paradoxically, Stalin's only company was the people he most despised - the members of the Politburo. The more he pushed about them, the more necessary they became in his private life, to fill the long winter evenings and sleepless nights with something. "He felt so lonely he didn't know what to do with himself," recalled Khrushchev.
Interestingly, Stalin's parties were practically exclusively male. And yet it would have been enough to give the generalissimo a wave of the hand for the NKVD in no time to deliver the most beautiful and talented dancers from Moscow.
Stalin with his daughter Svetlana in 1940. Over the years, the dictator has alienated all his relatives ... or sent them to camps.
Stalin, however, was paralyzing women, suffice to say that he had sex only in the dark, always in underpants, expecting his partner to be absolutely passive during a short intercourse. The art of talking to women, flirting, having fun together, was completely unknown to him. He was so afraid of social embarrassment that he preferred parties where a few or a dozen old Bolsheviks danced with each other to the same melodies repeated over and over again.
We work until five and then see me
The lack of any other company meant that comrades from the Politburo had to accompany Stalin several hours a day. Daily. "We had to carry out our tasks at work and in the positions for which we were elected, and besides, we had to attend parties at Stalin's, entertain him as if we were some characters in art," Khrushchev complained.
For obvious reasons, the refusal to take part in the evening binge at the dacha in Kuncewo was out of the question. Rather, it was the absence of an invitation that clearly suggested that the person was out of favor.
Khrushchev not only had to win the political games in the Kremlin to come to power. He was also doomed to parties with Stalin. Both in a photo from 1936.
During the feast, Stalin carefully made sure that everyone to the bottom met the successive toasts raised one after the other. When he noticed that one of the guests was simulating drinking, he forced them to drink additional "penalty" lines. Sometimes the libations were accompanied by fairly stale fun.
Milovan Djilas recalls:"Everyone guessed how many degrees below zero there were outside, and then, as a punishment, would drink (...) a glass for each step in which he had made a mistake." Beria, who always claimed that he was deliberately wrong by more degrees in order to get more vodka, was a particular cheat of the chief.
Blending alcohol and the hangover method
Stalin was a staunch opponent of the good old party rule of not mixing alcohol - pure Russian vodka was drank with heavy Georgian wines. The effect was deplorable, the libations ended "when the elite of the Soviet people was completely drunk and lay in their vomit under the table in the chief's dining room" , usually at 5-6 am, which by the way was a fantastic result for elderly men, partying practically every day.
With such intensity and regularity of drunkenness, it is no wonder that Stalin considered the best method for a hangover to be the classic "wedge" - Churchill, who visited Moscow in 1942 and was unable to get out of bed after a well-drunk supper in the morning, ordered the dictator to drink red Caucasian wine. Apparently it helped.
For Churchill, the diplomatic visit to Moscow in 1942 ended with a giant hangover. In the photo, from the left, Churchill, William Averell Harriman - the American ambassador to the USSR - Stalin and Molotov.
Final Melange
It is ironic that one such event cost Stalin his life. On Saturday, February 28, 1953, a group of Stalin's closest associates first watched a film with him in the Kremlin, then the party moved outside the city, to Kuntsev. Of course, they sat until dawn. As Joshua Rubenstein writes in Last Days of Stalin , the dictator was then "quite drunk and in a great mood, he escorted the guests to the door, joking kindly" .
To the joy of the Politburo comrades, the next day he did not summon them:"Khrushchev himself was surprised that there was no phone call from Kuntseva all day (...) he finally went to sleep". Other participants of the event acted similarly, only Beria, who had inexhaustible strength, went to visit his lover, who had been neglected recently (due to numerous libations).
At the same time, drunk, abandoned by his drinking companions, the most powerful man in the world died for many hours in a pool of his own urine, unable to count on anyone's help.
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