Ten Tickets

1935 · The Revolutionaries · Work 1000 of 1,871

The interior of a metro motor car standing at an underground platform on an evening in late April, seen from its rear end at seat height down its whole length, a row of open white bowl-shaped ceiling lamps, brown leather sofas along both walls, the sliding doors on the left side open, the car's outer panels at the door edge sand yellow above and brick red below, beyond the doors a bright hall with paired many-sided pylons of white and grey marble and a dense crowd in dark coats pressing toward the door, caps and arms raised, inside the car near the camera a girl of nine in a dark coat and knitted cap sitting on the sofa, a pale black-moustached man in a dark civilian overcoat one step inside the door, face in shadow, and standing in the open doorway itself, midway down the left side of the car, his back to the crowd, the man, a living figure in the scene and the only person whose face is sharp, a short stocky man of fifty-six in a plain grey military greatcoat and a peaked cap, one hand on the rail beside the door, his face turned toward the camera.

Who
Joseph Stalin, born Ioseb Jughashvili (1878–1953), ruled the Soviet Union as dictator from the late 1920s until his death. Born in December 1878 in Gori, Georgia, he became General Secretary of the Communist Party in 1922 and turned the office into the base of his power. From 1929 he forced the collectivisation of agriculture and drove industrialisation with extreme harshness; the country, he said in 1931, was 50 to 100 years behind and had to close the gap in ten. The cost was immense. In the famine of 1932–33, caused by the leadership, six to seven million people died, above all in Ukraine and Kazakhstan. In the "Great Terror" of 1937–38 at least 1.4 million people were arrested and more than 680,000 shot. In the early 1950s some 2.5 million people were held in the camps of the Gulag. In 1939 Stalin made his pact with Hitler; after the German invasion of 1941 he took over the conduct of the war himself. He died on 5 March 1953. The Moscow Metro, built under him as a showpiece, still runs today.
The moment
On the evening of 22 April 1935 the first line of the Moscow Metro was finished but not yet open; the public was already being allowed to take trial rides. In the Kremlin there was a birthday dinner for the nanny of Stalin's daughter Svetlana. Talk turned to the Metro, and Lazar Kaganovich, who ran the project for the party, had ten tickets brought for the women and the child. Then Stalin suddenly decided to come along. Kaganovich turned pale and suggested waiting until midnight; Stalin insisted on going at once. Down in the station it smelled of damp lime, everything clean and bright. The train arrived packed, the motor car was cleared for the party, and people on the platform cheered. At Okhotny Ryad they got out, the crowd surged in and tore the group apart. This is the moment in the picture: Stalin in the open door of the car, the crowd behind him.
The other side
Ten tickets for the women and a child, and then the boss came along. That evening he saw for himself what his showpiece machine did politically: cheering, crushing crowds, guards and police, a huge cast-iron lamp knocked over by the crowd, a son who wept hysterically afterwards. Soon afterwards Stalin spoke about the ride and the jubilation and called it a fetishism of the popular mind, a craving for a tsar. All of this was written down by Maria Svanidze, a relative of Stalin's, in her diary. She was arrested in 1937 and shot in 1942. The diary was kept in Stalin's private archive.

What the sources leave open: The ride is documented only by Maria Svanidze's diary entry of 29 April 1935, seven days later and in a devoted tone; no photograph is known. What Stalin wore is not recorded; greatcoat and peaked cap follow photographs of those years. The car, the seating and the companions' clothes are a composition. A later story of a halt in the tunnel contradicts the diary; the work follows the diary.

Further reading

Sources