The Kremlin enters the boy’s understanding not as a place he visits, but as a distant center of authority assembled from pictures and soldiers’ stories. Joseph Stalin’s home is said to be there, inside a walled compound of old palaces and churches. The boy’s image of the place combines visible architectural details with the enormous hopes others attach to it.

The Walled Compound

Pictures show the Kremlin as a cluster of palaces and churches enclosed behind a high wall. Above it rise domes the boy likens to huge radishes, their roots pointing skyward. Other pictures show the quarters where Lenin, Joseph Stalin’s late teacher, once lived. These concrete features give the Kremlin the air of an old, enclosed world, even as the stories told about it make it the heart of a modern political order.

Joseph Stalin’s Study

The soldiers describe the windows of Joseph Stalin’s study as remaining lit late into the night. In their account, people in Moscow and working masses around the world look toward those windows for inspiration and hope. Joseph Stalin is imagined there, working for them, devising ways to win the war and defeat the enemies of working people; his concern is said to extend even to oppressed people in distant countries. The Kremlin becomes vivid to the boy through this scene of labor behind illuminated windows, although it remains a place known at second hand.

Political Reverence and Religious Imagery

The soldiers’ differing regard for Lenin and Joseph Stalin recalls the peasants’ differing emphasis on God the Father and God the Son. The comparison places political devotion alongside religious belief without making the two identical: it shows how the Kremlin and its occupants acquire significance through the stories people tell about them. Set among churches and palaces, Joseph Stalin’s study is presented as a secular focus of expectation, with its light imagined as a sign of work, protection, and a hoped-for future.