For the past few decades, anthropology has viewed the exchange of alcohol as a lens to analyze power relations in society. Control over the means of production of the beverage is said to be a method of political influence and control. Joseph Stalin, who ruled the Soviet Union with an iron fist from 1924 to 1953, understood this early on!
For the paranoid, blood-thirsty mustached dictator, the drink served both as entertainment and internal repression. In the Politburo (the main soviet decision-making body), Stalin’s comrades lived under the daily fear of being shot. However, there is another thing that his collaborators dreaded intensely than being arrested: being invited to a party at Stalin’s.
After the Second World War, as the health of the Iron Man began to decline, Stalin distanced himself from the center of power and grew ever more reclusive, spending more and more time in his small residence in the suburbs of Moscow, a true vacation fortress.
Some of his close collaborators were becoming the real faces of power: Lavrenti Beria, Nikita Khrushchev, Georgy Malenkov, and Vyacheslav Molotov. This happy crowd was the main guest at his dacha. They were not the only ones. Stalin often invited famous actors, filmmakers, and leaders of foreign communist parties to drop by. Guests could hardly refuse, and they certainly never forgot…
One way or another, those little parties became an extension of politics. Dinners turned into evenings, evenings turned to parties, and parties turned into catastrophes. While Stalin had a lot of fun, the dinner-at-the-dacha was a constant nightmare for his guests. This was not the usual ordinary dinner at a slightly eccentric uncle’s. Khrushchev, a regular at his soirées, would say in his memoirs: “There was only one person who had fun during his parties: Stalin.”
Comrade Stalin invites you for a little “soirée”
To see how the evening begins, let’s inquire with our main witness: Khrushchev. Around four o’clock in the afternoon, Comrade Khrushchev (then the party leader in Moscow) received a little phone call saying, in essence, “Comrade Stalin would like to invite you to dinner.” Khrushchev, still traumatized by the previous night’s ordeal, lets out a big sigh and says, “Of course.” Armed guards arrived a few hours later to escort him into the lion’s den.
Once everyone arrived at the dacha, the supper could begin. Stalin reconnected with his Georgian roots and transformed into an impeccable host, providing his guests with a buffet of the most sumptuous dishes that could be found across the 11 time zones of the world. At a time when most of the Soviet Union was barely getting by, the Soviet leaders were feasting like there was no tomorrow. It is said that Stalin always had no less than ten different brands of vodka to offer his guests.
Among Stalin’s favorite vintages, the famous Khvanchkara stands out, a ruby-red wine. The luxury wine he cherished and liked to share was transported from Georgia in Red Army planes by colonels who tightly secured the barrels between their legs to minimize damage from turbulence (under the penalty of death, of course).
Beria’s awful pranks
At this point, the party was still more or less decent. I mean, no one was getting shot or sent to the gulag…Everyone was keeping an eye on their drink and carefully saying all the pretty things Stalin wanted to hear. Everyone was behaving conspicuously. Everyone except Beria, the dreaded chief of the secret police, who mechanically observed all his comrades with a creepy and calculating gaze.
He seized every opportunity to flatter Stalin. One of his favorite games was to point out who was pretending to drink during one of Stalin’s innumerable toasts. As passions heated up, no one wanted to risk being to candid, or maybe that was because they did not want the hangover in the morning. But that was wishful thinking : Beria would rat them out to Stalin every time he could. In the meantime, they drink Georgian wine, often white.
The worse part is that everyone knew Stalin was diluting his own drinks. Stalin would either cut his wine with water or simply abstain from drinking. Earlier in 1950, Stalin’s doctor had strongly recommended against drinking alcohol to alleviate pressure on his ailing heart. Stalin suffered from various health problems, including heart disease, high blood pressure, and arteriosclerosis. Additionally, he had a history of strokes, which had begun to affect his cognitive functions. The toll of his unhealthy lifestyle, characterized by heavy smoking and alcohol consumption, also contributed to his declining health.
Beria, who understood power struggles well and was more than willing to stoop to the worst tricks to please the big shot, would often place rotten tomatoes on Khrushchev’s chair while Stalin sometimes threw them right into his suit. There was nothing he seemed to have found more entertaining than watching his comrades dirty their pants on some old dirty tomatoes. Stalin even made it a rule just to entertain Beria: anyone showing up in a white suit would be promptly tomatoed! One of Stalin’s other favorite games involved banging Khrushchev’s head with his pipe to dislodge the ashes.
Unbeknowst to Khruschvev, Stalin was seriously considering getting rid of him. He despised the plump little man whom he suspected of wanting to overthrow him. And then, the villainous Beria knew too much, far too much. He knew all the state secrets, controlled half of the economic activity, and reigned with his own parallel terror. Indeed, Stalin forces him to dance the gopak, the famous Ukrainian dance requiring proper knee bending, which is litterally torture for Khruschev, who is already suffering from arthritis. Khrushchev has to spend the entire day recovering from the dance.
Binge-drinking for the Motherland!
It was after dinner that things started to get tricky. In the purest Georgian hospitality tradition, there was a nice little ritual of exchanging good words in honor of the guests and the host. But beware, at Stalin’s, praising the dictator was not optional, and the toast in question was not a half-filled sample. It would be an understatement to say that drinking was an obligation. One way or another, everyone eventually became very drunk.
Visiting Moscow, the party leader of Yugoslavia, Milovan Djilas, tells us how these merry pranksters played a game of guessing the room temperature to get drunk without measure. The goal was to guess the temperature right and drink a shot of vodka for each degree too much or too little. Following this logic, mixing Fahrenheit and Celsius probably amounted to instant liver cirrhosis.
To avoid alcohol coma, some hid in the toilets for a nap. But Beria, always on the lookout, would report them to Stalin, who would confront them, saying, “Do you think you’re better than me?” Several were shot for less than that! Beria himself bribed one of the waitresses and asked her to serve them colored water. Of course Stalin found out almost immediately and mercilessly proceeded to force the poor guy to drink out several shots.
Journey to the End of the Night with cowboys and cognac
Once our guests were well-lubricated from the inside, they moved on to the cinema. Stalin had his own cinema with an impressive collection of films seized by the Red Army during the capture of Berlin.
This collection partly came from the private stash of Joseph Goebbels, the chief propagandist of the Nazi regime and also – believe it or not – a doctor of literature. The catch was that choosing a good film was a bit complicated. Stalin was a bit whimsical, and it happened that he had the guy in charge of choosing and projecting the film killed. Not exactly the job with the best career prospects or the clearest job description.
That being said, Stalin liked westerns and gangster films. When in doubt, we chose a film he had seen a thousand times. The cinema had about twenty chairs in pairs, separated by small tables holding chocolates, brandy, and vodka (because, obviously). The small group of cinephiles often started the screening well after midnight, and Stalin didn’t do things halfway: he commented abundantly, gave away spoilers on the spot, and often ordered a second film before saying, “How about grabbing a bite?”
The conclusion of this grotesque libation spree offered a rather bleak view of the devastation of Soviet Russia after the Second World War. The top leaders of the Union spent a good part of the day sleepwalking to recover from their sessions of liquid torture. The guests were then escorted home half-dazed by guards in the dim light of the morning.
Often barely conscious, they were placed in their beds, with the help of a firearm, under the relieved gaze of their wives who feared they might never see them again. Some close associates of Stalin became alcoholics. One of the regulars, Khrushchev, eventually took the lead. As for Beria, the architect of the great purges, he was one of the first to go when Stalin died in 1953.
More sources on Stalin’s life
- Service, Robert. “Stalin: A Biography.” Belknap Press, 2006.
- Montefiore, Simon Sebag. “Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar.” Vintage, 2004.
- Tucker, Robert C. “Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, 1928-1941.” W.W. Norton & Company, 1990.
- Khlevniuk, Oleg V. “Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator.” Yale University Press, 2015.
- Conquest, Robert. “Stalin: Breaker of Nations.” Viking Adult, 1991.
- Davies, Sarah, and Harris, James R. “Stalin: A New History.” Cambridge University Press, 2005.
- Kotkin, Stephen. “Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929–1941.” Penguin Press, 2017.
- Getty, J. Arch. “Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives.” Cambridge University Press, 1993.
- Getty, J. Arch, and Naumov, Oleg V. “The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932–1939.” Yale University Press, 1999.
- McDermott, Kevin. “Stalin: Revolutionary in an Era of War.” Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
Pierre-Olivier Bussieres is the author of the podcast Le Temps d’une Bière, producer of Hoppy History and editor-in-chief of Le Temps d’une Bière media. He holds a graduate degree in political science from Carleton University.
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