Stalin

Inside the triangular Kremlin, the Imperial Senate formed its own triangular fortress, and Stalin’s wing was a fortress within the fortress. Even the regime personnel given regular Kremlin passes for state business needed a special pass for Stalin’s wing. Located one floor below where Lenin’s had been and on the building’s opposite side, it came to be known to regime insiders as “the Little Corner.”²³⁰ Stalin had marked his permanent shift to the Kremlin by having the interiors redone. The walls in the offices were lined with shoulder-height wood paneling, under the theory that wood vapors enhanced air quality, and the elevators were paneled with mahogany. The tiled stove in Stalin’s office yielded to central heating. Behind his working desk hung a portrait of Lenin. In a corner, on a small table, stood a display case with Lenin’s death mask. Another small table held several telephones (“Stalin,” he would answer). Next to the desk was a stand with a vase holding fresh fruit. In the rear was a door that led to a room for relaxation, rarely used, with oversized hanging maps and a giant globe. In the main office, between two of the three large windows that let in afternoon sun, sat a black leather couch where, in his better moods, Stalin and guests sipped tea with lemon. In the country’s darkest moments he could exude optimism, but when, to others, matters seemed brightest, he could become gloomy, withdrawn.

Ten miles away, in Volynskoe village, near the town of Kuntsevo on the right bank of the Moscow River, the OGPU completed construction on a new dacha for him in 1934—within just a year, using fiberboard panels (not long-lasting, but easy to put up).²³¹ In contrast to the neo-Gothic style of Zubalovo, Meran Merzhanyants, known as Miron Merzhanov, an ethnic Armenian and the head architect for the central executive committee, adopted a simpler neoclassicism for the one-story, seven-room villa with sundeck and veranda.²³²

The Near Dacha, as it became known, sat on thirty acres in a deep wood and was encircled by a solid wall made of plywood, four to five meters high, which was painted green, like the residence, to blend in. The site proved easy to secure but at first noisy (to one side lay the village of Davydkovo, which filled with drunken men at night, and to another, the Kiev Station freight depot).²³³ For a time, Stalin continued to sleep at his new Kremlin apartment and use the Zubalovo dacha, but Nadya’s absence weighed on him at places they had shared. Soon he decided on the Near Dacha as his permanent residence.

²³⁴

Hitler lived at the eighteenth-century Palais Schulenburg, at 77 Wilhelmstrasse, the chancellor’s residence since 1871, which during the Weimar Republic had acquired a modernist addition, where Hitler had his formal office. The Führer had the palace part remodeled, recovering the original grandeur but with an elegant simplicity. He would also have his Munich apartment (16 Prinzregentenplatz) refurbished in rectilinear forms, opening up larger light-filled, strikingly modern and spare spaces. These interiors were photographed for the German public. Additionally, Hitler vastly expanded the chalet-style farmhouse in the alpine border town of Berchtesgaden, in the Obersalzberg, where he had stayed on holiday. It had been rechristened the Berghof (“mountain farm”) and now had more than thirty rooms.²³⁵

An ample dining room, study, and great hall were built with Swiss stone and pinewood paneling, and the Teutonic furniture, too, was deliberately oversized. Picture windows and an open-air terrace afforded panoramic views of the snowcapped Bavarian Alps and Austria in the distance. Over time, the entire mountain area would be closed in a wide security perimeter with a high fence, but the loss of physical accessibility was compensated for by images of Hitler’s domestic life published in periodicals. Commercially available photo albums also depicted him hiking in the pure mountain air with his dog or entertaining blond children at his mountain retreat. Postcards for sale showed him feeding deer on the terrace—a private, softer Führer.²³⁶