He had exiled the inspiring Trotsky, who denounced him as "the grave-digger of the proletarian revolution." He had isolated the intellectual Bukharin, who regarded him as a "debased Genghis Khan." By 1929 Stalin had established what Trotsky called "the dictatorship of the secretariat." He was thus able to initiate a revolution more far-reaching than Lenin's. At the time its full horror was hidden by a fog of propaganda. But during the Second World War Stalin told Churchill that his "revolution from above" had surpassed, in the severity of its impact on the Russian people, the Ger-man invasion itself. It was no wonder that at night the floodlit Red Flag, which a concealed wind-machine kept flying above the crenellated walls, tented towers and gold domes of the Kremlin, reminded contemporaries of a "pool of blood suspended in the darkness."' Also gleaming from the Kremlin's battlements were the gilt double-headed eagles of the Romanovs, not replaced until 1937 by Stalin's huge illuminated red glass stars. Other royal relics littered the palaces, cathedrals and barbicans of this 65-acre museum, not just State treasures such as the crown jewels but priceless bric-a-brac: the red velvet, gold-embroidered saddle of Ivan the Terrible, the engraved armour of Boris Godunov, the huge boots which Peter the Great made for himself, Catherine the Great's silver wedding dress. But time had moved on in the Kremlin: the clock on the Saviour Tower no longer chimed the "Preobrazhensky March" but the "Internationale" (so tuneless that it was hardly recognis-able). In 1929 Stalin demolished various imperial and ecclesiastical edifices to clear the ground for Communist monuments such as the military academy. Moreover, the kite-shaped fortress overlooking the Moscow River became more impregnable than ever. It was Stalin's Castle, a night-marish labyrinth shrouded in "cloud[s] of secrecy" and enclosed by walls of terror. Elaborate measures were taken to preserve the safety of Russia's man of steel. There were sentries at every corner. Crack secret police pa-trolled the corridors and grounds. Guards checked the identity of all visitors against their photographs. Passwords were constantly changed. The air was tested for traces of poison gas. At the centre of this stronghold Stalin himself dwelt with becoming simplicity—in the imperial servants' quarters of the Poteshny Palace. His small study was plainly furnished with a bookshelf, a battered leather ottoman and a writing table. On it stood two photographs: one of his daughter Svetlana, the other of Lenin reading Pravda. No pictures hung on the walls. Instead there was a plaque inscribed with Dante's line, "Go your way and let people talk"; and an intaglio profile of the wife of Zeus above Pushkin's sonnet, "Hera, the far-famed goddess of power."' The adjoining bedroom was similarly modest: the windows were nar-row, a couple of rugs covered the worn floor and Stalin slept under an old army blanket. Nothing in his personal appearance suggested that he was the embodiment of power. He invariably wore a plain khaki tunic but-toned up to the chin and uniform trousers stuffed into long black boots. He was short and swarthy with thick, greying hair, deep, dark, slightly squinting eyes, a nicotine-stained moustache and bad teeth—having a penchant for medical murder himself, Stalin did not trust dentists. Some people, to be sure, perceived a monster. Boris Pasternak said that Stalin was "the most terrible creature he had ever seen, a crab-like dwarf with a yellow, pock-marked face and a bristling moustache."' Another poet, Osip Mandelstam, was repelled by "the huge laughing cockroaches on his top. lip "'° When Stalin laughed, the critic Kornelii Zelinsky noted, "His eye-brows and moustache move apart and something cunning appears. Tiger-ish, in fact."
Other outsiders discerned Stalin's "brutal lack of scruple" and even the sycophantic New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty found him "crude," "hard and cruel." Insiders were exposed to the auto-crat's feral rages, drunken buffoonery, paranoid suspicions, caustic cyni-cism and obscene invective. Women were by no means immune, not even the highest in the land. Stalin once told Nadezhda Krupskaya that she was a syphilitic whore and later said that if she misbehaved he would make someone else Lenin's widow. Yet for the most part visitors were overwhelmed by Stalin's simplic-ity and sincerity; by his unaffected friendliness and his unassuming de-meanour. H. G. Wells thought him kindly, "candid, fair and honest"— and tried to get him to join the P.E.N. Club. The American journalist Eugene Lyons emerged from a rare interview saying, "I like that man."'After his first meeting with Stalin the British Ambassador Lord Chilston told his staff, "Do you know, I think the chap's a gentleman."15 It was hard to reconcile the shy Kremlin recluse with the dictator around whom a personality cult was forming so extravagant as even, apparently, to surprise its subject. "If this goes on," Stalin remarked to one of his bodyguards, "some night I'll find my own statue in my bed." Stalin always claimed that he discouraged personal adulation. In fact he craved it, once growling over a portrait showing his pock marks that artists see too much. The semi-cripple with the withered left arm and two toes joined on his left foot was inordinately vain. The shoemaker's son from Georgia responded with whiplash ferocity to any slight. The sometime seminarian from Tiflis built power on the foundation of awe. The Red revolutionary established his legitimacy by becoming the heir of Lenin. But it was not enough to be the guardian of Leninist orthodoxy; even though, as Zinoviev complained, Stalin could thereby claim to be infalli-ble. Stalin must also be the high priest of Lenin's own cult. For Lenin had been genuinely revered, not because he inspired terror but because he embodied hope. On his death huge queues had formed outside the Hall of Columns in what had formerly been the Nobles' Club, where his body lay. Bonfires were lit in the streets to ward off the intense cold. Amid the crowd were Pasternak and Mandelstam, the latter joking that people had
come to complain to Lenin about the Bolsheviks but "it won't do any good." In fact Mandelstam marvelled at the spectacle of the "Moscow of ancient days burying one of her tsars," and his wife Nadezhda concluded that Lenin's funeral was "the last flicker of the Revolution as a genuine popular movement." Stalin wanted to be the keeper of that flame. He needed to preserve Lenin for his own purposes. Perhaps inspired by Howard Carter's discovery of the mummified Tutankhamun, Stalin advo-cated the embalming of Lenin's body. And in 1929 he approved the con-struction of a permanent shrine, beside the rose-coloured Kremlin Wall in Red Square, for the supreme effigy of Communism. It was a marvellous fulfilment of Lenin's own (frustrated) ambition to create "monumental propaganda" and an extraordinary realisation of his remark that great lib-erators are often fated after their deaths to serve as the icons for some new tyranny. Lenin's mausoleum was a stepped pyramid of russet and dark grey granite (grey being a "worker's colour" ), and it became the focus of intense devotion. Just what superstitions this pharaonic monument inspired in a godless theocracy it is impossible to say, though the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky did suggest that Lenin's preserved body symbolised the ever-lasting life of Communism. Anyway, a perpetual procession of votaries shuffled towards the immobile guard of honour, under the porphyry inscription of Lenin's name, through the bronze portals, down the dimly lit steps, into the labradorite-tiled Funeral Hall and past the immortal corpse. It lay in a scarlet-lined, glass-topped sarcophagus based on a sable plinth surrounded by magnificent blooms, which were changed daily. The head rested on a red silk cushion. A cloth of purple and black satin shrouded the loins and legs. The torso was dressed in a khaki gabardine tunic with the Order of the Red Banner pinned over the heart. The little hands, nails carefully manicured, were crossed. The auburn beard was trimmed. The eyes were closed as though in sleep. The lips were fixed in the ghost of a smile. The yellow-white skin was drawn smoothly over the high cheek-bones and domed forehead. The flesh was in the pink. It was kept so in a marinade of chemicals. Lenin's embalmers regularly swabbed his exposed surfaces with a secret "balsam," impregnating the tis-sue, which did not become waxy but remained firm and resilient. They paid particular attention to the face, its lips stitched together, its eyelids sewn over false eyes, its skull void of grey matter—the brain had been sent to the Lenin Institute, where it was sliced into 30,000 pieces for scientific study. Every 15 months the whole body experienced a little resurrection—it was given a "general overhaul."The inner cocoon of rubber bandages was unwrapped and the stick-like limbs and eviscerated trunk were bathed in a solution of glycerine and potassium acetate ( while the embalmers sometimes got drunk on the 96 percent proof spirit used in the preservation process). The survival of these cosmetic taxidermists depended on Lenin's own survival. To foreign journalists they nervously demonstrated the continuing elasticity of the flesh, pinching the cheeks and tweaking the nose. Plainly Lenin possessed enough elan vital to defy rigor mortis.
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