Stalin (61 page)

As the supreme authority, Stalin, of course, was all these correspondents’ prime addressee. It is hard to know the precise number of letters addressed to him personally, but it apparently exceeded several hundred thousand per year.
³⁵
Obviously not all of them reached his desk; he was shown a selected sample. The nature of this sample is of interest from a number of perspectives. Primarily, it shows how well informed Stalin was about people’s lives and tells us what he expressed an interest in seeing. No doubt the apparat was given criteria for selecting the letters he would be shown.

Handling letters addressed to Stalin was a complicated bureaucratic process. Within the Central Committee’s Special Sector, which served as Stalin’s personal secretariat, was a division dedicated to processing his mail. After the war this division was called the Special Sector’s “Fifth Section.” In early 1950 it had a staff of twenty.
³⁶
They received and logged letters addressed to Stalin and immediately forwarded a significant portion of them to various agencies for review. The heads of the Special Sector, especially Stalin’s personal assistant, Aleksandr Poskrebyshev, were shown the most important and interesting letters.
³⁷
Poskrebyshev further filtered them, leaving just a few of the most interesting for his boss. As a result of this tiered system, Stalin saw just a tiny percentage of the hundreds of thousands of letters sent to him, and over time this number shrank. In early 1946 Stalin saw about ten letters per month, but by 1952 he was shown just one or two.
³⁸

This small sample revealed little about real life in the Soviet Union. Most of the letters reaching Stalin’s desk belonged to one of three categories: queries on matters of theory, letters from old acquaintances, and a large number of letters of support. On extremely rare occasions he might be shown correspondence that tiptoed around some unsavory aspect of Soviet reality. Overall, the letters he saw reflected the
vozhd
’s growing desire to live in the past or savor hopes for the future. Pressing matters of real consequence likely to provoke negative emotions were avoided.

As ignorant of the life of the people as the
vozhd
was, the people knew even less what kind of a man he was. Partly due to his personality and partly out of calculation, Stalin, unlike many other dictators, rarely spoke before large audiences. He preferred to express himself in writing. The aggressive propaganda of Stalin’s articles, interviews, and theoretical works created the impression that the invisible
vozhd
was ever-present and all-knowing. His cryptic sententiousness gave him a certain charisma.

Tight control over the alchemy of official “Staliniana” has created false and doubly majestic images of Stalin and his accomplishments.
³⁹
These images outlive the man himself and have an appeal even in contemporary Russia. The collapse of the Soviet Union, the stresses of the transitional period, corruption, poverty, and glaring social inequality all feed the longing for a social utopia. A significant portion of Russian society seeks recipes for the present by looking to the Stalinist past. Popular images of the greatness of the Stalinist empire—of equality and the fight against corruption, of the joy and purity of this distant life undone by “enemies”—are exploited by unscrupulous commentators and politicians. How great is the danger that a blend of historical ignorance, bitterness, and social discontent will provide fertile ground for pro-Stalinist lies and distortions to take root?

Could it really be that Russia in the twenty-first century is in danger of repeating the mistakes of the twentieth?