Suslov and the Party Leadership's Displeasure with Vladimir Semenov's Collection

Vladimir Semyonovich Semyonov's collection is customarily spoken of as outstanding, and the man himself is revered not only as a politician, diplomat and scholar but as a great Soviet patron of the arts. Only in its day his collection drew no small amount of reproach and displeasure from the leadership of the Party and the Soviet state. Thus Semyonov's diaries recall how Suslov, known to us chiefly from anecdotes about unparalleled bureaucratic obtuseness, raised the matter of Semyonov's collection at a meeting of the Politburo under the formulation "collecting the wrong things". Can you even imagine such off-the-scale state lunacy, when the private collections and hobbies of some diplomat or member of the government are discussed at the very highest level? Though, I think, it will not be long before we slide down to that level ourselves. True, on that occasion Brezhnev politely shut Suslov up, but the latter did not calm down and resolved to get at Semyonov in person, expressing his displeasure that a man in such a post should speak up in defence of the formalists. "With pleasure," Vladimir Semyonovich replied wittily.