STALIN: THE COURT OF THE RED TSAR

BY

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE

PART TWO

THE JOLLY FELLOWS: STALIN AND KIROV 1932–1934

 

8. The Funeral

Nadya died instantly. Hours later, Stalin stood in the dining room absorbing the news. He asked his sister-in-law Zhenya Alliluyeva “what was missing in him.” The family were shocked when he threatened suicide, something they “had never heard before.” He grieved in his room for days: Zhenya and Pavel decided to stay with him to make sure he did not harm himself. He could not understand why it had happened, raging what did it mean? Why had such a terrible stab in the back been dealt to him of all people? “He was too intelligent not to know that people always commit suicide in order to punish someone . . .” wrote his daughter Svetlana, so he kept asking whether it was true he had been inconsiderate, hadn’t he loved her? “I was a bad husband,” he confessed to Molotov. “I had no time to take her to the cinema.” He told Vlasik, “She’s completely overturned my life!” He stared sadly at Pavel, growling, “That was a hell of a nice present you gave her! A pistol!”

Around 1 p.m., Professor Kushner and a colleague examined the body of Nadezhda Stalin in her little bedroom. “The position of the body,” the professor scrawled on a piece of squared paper ripped from one of the children’s exercise books, “was that her head is on the pillow turned to the right side. Near the pillow on the bed is a little gun.” The housekeeper must have replaced the gun on the bed. “The face is absolutely tranquil, the eyes semi-closed, semi-open. On the right part of face and neck, there are blue and red marks and blood . . .” There were bruises on her face: did Stalin really have something to hide? Had he returned to the apartment, quarrelled with her, hit her and then shot her? Given his murderous pedigree, one more death is not impossible. Yet the bruise could have been caused by falling off the bed. No one with any knowledge of that night has ever suggested that Stalin killed her. But he was certainly aware that his enemies would whisper that he had.

“There is a five-millimetre hole over the heart—an open hole,” noted the Professor. “Conclusion—death was immediate from an open wound to the heart.” This scrap of paper, which one can now see in the State Archive, was not to be seen again for six decades.

Molotov, Kaganovich and Sergo came and went, deciding what to do: as usual in such moments, the Bolshevik instinct was to lie and cover up, even though in this case if they had been more open, they might have avoided the most damaging slanders. It was clear enough that Nadya had committed suicide but Molotov, Kaganovich and her godfather Yenukidze got Stalin’s agreement that this self-destruction could not be announced publicly. It would be taken as a political protest. They would announce she had died of appendicitis. The doctors, a profession whose Hippocratic oath was to be as undermined by the Bolsheviks as by the Nazis, signed the lie. Servants were informed that Stalin had been at his dacha with Molotov and Kalinin—but unsurprisingly, they gossiped dangerously.

Yenukidze drafted the announcement of her death and then wrote a letter of condolence, to be published next day in Pravda, signed by all the leaders’ wives and then the leaders themselves, starting with Nadya’s four greatest friends—Ekaterina Voroshilova, Polina Molotova, Dora Khazan and Maria Kaganovich: “Our close friend, a person with a wonderful soul . . . young, vigorous and devoted to the Bolshevik Party and the Revolution.” Even this death was seen by these singular dogmatists in terms of Bolshevism.[1]

Since Stalin was barely functioning, Yenukidze and the magnates debated how to arrange this unique funeral. The Bolshevik funeral ritual combined elements of Tsarist funeral tradition with its own idiosyncratic culture. The deceased were beautified by the finest morticians, usually the professors in charge of Lenin’s cadaver, then lay in state, snowy faces often heavily rouged, among the surreal mise-en-scène of lush tropical palms, bouquets, red banners, all unnaturally illuminated with arc lights. The Politburo bore the open coffin to, and from, the Hall of Columns where they also stood guard like knights of old. The rigorous eminence was then cremated and a plangent military funeral was held, with the Politburo again bearing an elaborate catafalque enclosing the urn of ashes which they placed in the Kremlin Wall. But Stalin himself must have demanded an old-fashioned funeral.

Yenukidze presided over the Funeral Commission with Dora Khazan, Andreyev’s wife, and Pauker, the Chekist who was so close to Stalin. They met first thing next morning and decided on the procession, the place of burial, the guard of honour. Pauker, the theatrical expert—ex-coiffeur of the Budapest Opera—was in charge of the orchestras: there were to be two, a military one and a theatrical one of fifty instruments.[2]

Stalin could not speak himself. He asked Kaganovich, the Politburo’s best speaker, to give the oration. Even that energetic bulldozer of a man, fresh from shooting droves of innocent Kuban Cossacks, was daunted by the burden of giving such a speech in front of Stalin himself, but as with so many other macabre chores, “Stalin asked and I did it.”[3]

The death of Nadya from appendicitis was broken to the children out at Zubalovo: Artyom was distraught but Vasily never recovered. Svetlana, six, did not grasp this finality. Voroshilov, who was so kind in all matters outside politics, visited her but could not talk for weeping. The older children were driven to Moscow. Svetlana remained in the country until the funeral.

When the body was removed from the apartment, some time on the morning of the 10th, a little girl in the Horse Guards, opposite Stalin’s Poteshny Palace, sat glued to the window of her apartment. Natalya Andreyeva, daughter of Andreyev and Dora Khazan who was managing the funeral with Yenukidze, watched as a group of men carried down the coffin. Stalin walked beside it, wearing no gloves in the freezing cold, clutching at the side of the coffin with tears running down his cheeks.[4] The body must have been taken to the Kremlevka to cover up the bruises.

The schoolboys, Vasily Stalin and Artyom, arrived at Stalin’s flat where Pavel, Zhenya and Nadya’s sister Anna, took turns watching over the widower who remained in his room and would not come out for dinner. The gloomy apartment was pervaded by whispers: Artyom’s mother arrived and foolishly told her son the spellbinding truth about the suicide. Artyom rashly asked the housekeeper about it. Both he and his mother were reprimanded. “The things I saw in that house!” recalls Artyom.

During the night, the body was delivered to the Hall of Columns close to Red Square and the Kremlin. It was to be the scene of some of the great dramas and lying-in-states of Stalin’s rule. At eight the next morning, Yagoda joined the Funeral Commission.

The three smaller children were taken to the hall where Nadezhda Alliluyeva Stalin lay in an open casket, her round face surrounded by bouquets, her bruises exquisitely powdered and rouged away by Moscow’s macabre maestros. “She was very beautiful in her coffin, very young, her face clear and lovely,” recalls her niece Kira Alliluyeva. Zina Ordzhonikidze, the plump half-Yakut wife of the irrepressible Sergo, took Svetlana’s hand and led her up to the coffin. She cried and they rushed her out. Yenukidze comforted her, despatching her back to Zubalovo. She only learned of the suicide a decade later, incongruously from the Illustrated London News.

Stalin arrived accompanied by the Politburo, who stood guard around the catafalque, a duty to which they were to grow accustomed in the deadly years ahead. Stalin was weeping. Vasily left Artyom and ran forward towards Stalin and “hung on to his father, saying, ‘Papa don’t cry!’ ” To a chorus of sobs from Nadya’s family and the hardmen of the Politburo and Cheka, the Vozhd approached the coffin with Vasily holding on to him. Stalin looked down at this woman who had loved, hated, punished and rejected him. “I’d never seen Stalin cry before,” said Molotov, “but as he stood there beside the coffin, the tears ran down his cheeks.”

“She left me like an enemy,” Stalin said bitterly but then Molotov heard him say: “I didn’t save you.” They were about to nail down the coffin when Stalin suddenly stopped them. To everyone’s surprise, he leaned down, lifted Nadya’s head and began to kiss her ardently. This provoked more weeping.

The coffin was carried out into Red Square where it was laid on a black funeral carriage with four little onion domes on each corner holding an intricate canopy, a cortège that seemed to belong in Tsarist times. There was an honour guard marching around it and the streets were lined with soldiers. Six grooms in black led six horses and ahead, a military brass band played the funeral march. Bukharin, who was close to Nadya but had tainted her politically, offered his condolences to Stalin. The widower insisted strangely that he had gone to the dacha after the banquet; he was not in the apartment. The death was nothing to do with him. So Stalin propagated an alibi.

The procession set off through the streets, the public held far back by police. Here was the first of many funerals in which the cause of death was concealed from most of the mourners. Stalin walked between Molotov and the shrewd, hawk-eyed Armenian Mikoyan, themselves flanked by Kaganovich and Voroshilov. Pauker, resplendent in his uniform, belly buttressed by his invisible corset, kept pace to the side. Vasily and Artyom walked behind them along with the family, the cream of the Bolshevik movement and delegates from Nadya’s Academy.

Her mother Olga blamed Nadya: “How could you do this?” she addressed her absent daughter. “How could you leave the children?” Most of the family and leaders agreed, and sympathized with Stalin.

“Nadya was wrong,” declared the forthright Polina. “She left him at such a difficult time.”

Artyom and Vasily fell behind the band and lost sight of Stalin. It has variously been claimed that Stalin either did not go to the funeral or that he walked all the way to the Novodevichy Cemetery. Neither is true. Yagoda insisted that it was not safe for Stalin to walk the whole route. When the procession reached Manege Square, Stalin, along with the deceased’s mother, were driven to the cemetery.

At Novodevichy, Stalin stood on one side of the grave, and the two boys, Vasily and Artyom, watched him from the other. Bukharin spoke, then Yenukidze announced the main speaker: “It was so difficult,” Kaganovich remembered, “with Stalin there.” The Iron Commissar, more used to tub-thumping broadsides, delivered his oration in that special Bolshevik language: “Comrades, we are at the funeral of one of our best members of our Party. She grew up in the family of a Bolshevik worker . . . organically connected with our Party . . . she was the devoted friend of those who ruled . . . fighting the great struggle. She distinguished herself by the best features of a Bolshevik—firmness, toughness in the struggle . . .” Then he turned to the Vozhd: “We’re close friends and comrades of Comrade Stalin. We understand the weight of Comrade Stalin’s loss ... We understand we must share the burdens of Comrade Stalin’s loss.”

Stalin picked up a handful of soil and threw it onto the coffin. Artyom and Vasily were asked to do the same. Artyom asked why it was necessary. “So she can have some earth from your hand,” he was told. Later Stalin chose the monument that rested over her grave, with a rose to remember the one she wore in her hair and proudly emblazoned with the sacred words: “Member of the Bolshevik Party.” For the rest of his life, Stalin ruminated on her death. “Oh Nadya, Nadya, what did you do?” he mused in his old age, excusing himself: “There was always so much pressure on me.” The suicide of a spouse usually affects the surviving partner, often leaving the bitter taste of guilt, betrayal and, above all, desertion. Nadya’s abandonment of Stalin wounded and humiliated him, breaking one more of his meagre ties to human sympathy, redoubling his brutality, jealousy, coldness and self-pity. But the political challenges of 1932, particularly what Stalin regarded as betrayals by some of his comrades, also played their part.

“After 1932,” Kaganovich observed, “Stalin changed.”[5]

The family watched over Stalin, letting themselves into the apartment in case he needed anything. One night, Zhenya Alliluyeva visited him but there was no sound. Then she heard an ugly screeching and found the Vozhd lying on a sofa in the half-light, spitting on the wall. She knew he had been there a very long time because the wall was dripping with glistening trails of spit.

“What on earth are you doing, Joseph?” she asked him. “You can’t stay like that.” He said nothing, staring at the saliva rolling down the wall.[6]

At the time, Maria Svanidze, the wife of Alyosha, his former brother-in-law, who now began to keep a remarkable diary,[7] thought Nadya’s death had made him “less of a marble hero.”

In his despair, he repeated two questions: “Never mind the children, they forgot her in a few days, but how could she do this to me?” Sometimes he saw it the other way round, asking Budyonny: “I understand how she could do this to me, but what about the children?” Always the conversation ended thus: “She broke my life. She crippled me.” This was a humiliating personal failure that undermined his confidence. Stalin, wrote Svetlana, “wanted to resign but the Politburo said, ‘No, no, you have to stay!’ ”

He swiftly recovered the Messianic confidence in his mission: the war against the peasants and his enemies within the Party. His mind strayed onto the newly arrested Eismont, Smirnov and Riutin whose “Platform” had been found in his wife’s room. He was drinking a lot, suffering insomnia. A month after her death, on 17 December, he scrawled a strange note to Voroshilov: “The cases of Eismont, Smirnov and Riutin are full of alcohol. We see an opposition steeped in vodka. Eismont, Rykov. Hunting wild animals. Tomsky, repeat Tomsky. Roaring wild animals that growl. Smirnov and other Moscow rumours. Like a desert. I feel terrible, not sleeping much.” This letter shows how disturbed Stalin was after Nadya’s death. It reeks of drink and despair.

He did not soften towards the peasants. On 28 December, Postyshev sent Stalin a note about placing GPU guards on grain elevators because so much bread was being stolen by starving people. Then he added, “There’ve been strong elements of sabotage of bread supplies in the collective Machine Tractor Stations . . . Let me send 2–300 kulaks from Dneipropetrovsk to the North by order of the GPU.”

“Right! Pravilno!” agreed Stalin enthusiastically in his blue pencil.

Nadya hung over Stalin until his own death. Whenever he encountered anyone who knew Nadya well, he talked about her. Two years later, when he met Bukharin at the theatre, he missed a whole act, talking about Nadya, how he could not live without her. He often discussed her with Budyonny.[8] The family met every 8th of November to remember her but he hated these anniversaries, remaining in the south—yet he always kept photographs of her, larger and larger ones, round his houses. He claimed he gave up dancing when Nadya died.

Thousands of letters of condolence poured into Stalin’s apparat so the few he chose to keep are interesting: “She was fragile as a flower,” read one. Perhaps he preserved it because it finished about him: “Remember, we need you so take care of yourself.” Then he kept a poem sent to him, dedicated to her, that again appealed to his vision of self:

Night ocean, Wild storm . . .

A haunted silhouette on the bridge of the ship.

It’s the captain. Who is he?

A man of blood and flesh.

Or is he iron and steel?

When students wanted to name their institute after her, he did not agree but simply sent the request to Nadya’s sister, Anna: “After reading this note, leave it on my desk!” The pain of the subject was still fresh sixteen years later when a sculptor wrote to say that he wanted to give Stalin a bust of Nadya. Stalin wrote laconically to Poskrebyshev, his chef de cabinet: “ Tell him that you received the letter and you’re returning it. Stalin.”

There was no time for mourning. The Party was at war.

At 4 p.m. on 12 November, the day after the funeral, Stalin arrived at his office to meet Kaganovich, Voroshilov, Molotov and Sergo. Alongside them was Stalin’s closest friend, Sergei Mironovich Kirov, First Secretary of Leningrad and Politburo member. “After Nadya’s tragic death,” Maria Svanidze noticed that “Kirov was the closest person who managed to approach Joseph intimately and simply, to give him that missing warmth and cosiness.” Stalin turned to Kirov who, he said, “cared for me like a child.”[9]

Always singing operatic arias loudly, brimming with good cheer and boyish enthusiasm, Kirov was one of those uncomplicated men who win friends easily. Small, handsome with deep-set brown, slightly Tartar eyes, pock-marked, brown-haired and high-cheekboned, women and men seemed to like him equally. Married without children, he was said to be a womanizer with a special eye on the ballerinas of the Mariinsky Ballet which he controlled in Leningrad.[10] Certainly he followed ballet and opera closely, listening to it in his own apartment by a special link. A workaholic like his comrades, Kirov liked the outdoors, camping and hunting, with his boon companion Sergo. Like Andreyev, Kirov was an avid mountaineer, an appropriate hobby for a Bolshevik. He was at ease in his own skin. It was perhaps this that made him so attractive to Stalin whose friendships resembled crushes—and, like crushes, they could turn swiftly into bitter envy. Now he wanted to be with Kirov all the time: Kirov was in and out of his office five times during the days after Nadya’s funeral.

Born Sergei Kostrikov in 1886, the son of a feckless clerk who left him an orphan, in Urzhum, five hundred miles north-east of Moscow, Kirov was sent by charity to the Kazan Industrial School where he excelled. But the 1905 Revolution interfered with his plans for university, and he joined the Social Democrat Party, becoming a professional revolutionary. In between exiles, he married the daughter of a Jewish watchmaker but like all good Bolsheviks, his personal life “was subordinated to the revolutionary cause,” according to his wife. During the doldrums before the war, Kirov had worked as a journalist in the bourgeois press, which was strictly banned by the Party, and this was a black mark on his Bolshevik pedigree. Nineteen seventeen found him setting up power in the Terek in the North Caucasus. During the Civil War, Kirov was one of the swashbuckling commissars in the North Caucasus beside Sergo and Mikoyan. In Astrakhan he enforced Bolshevik power in March 1919 with liberal blood-letting: over four thousand were killed. When a bourgeois was caught hiding his own furniture, Kirov ordered him shot. He and Sergo, whose lives and deaths were parallel, engineered the seizure of Georgia in 1921, remaining in Baku afterwards, both brutal Bolsheviks of the Civil War generation.[11]

He had probably met Stalin in 1917 but got to know his patron on holiday in 1925: “Dear Koba, I’m in Kislovodsk . . . I’m getting better. In a week, I’ll come to you . . . Greetings to everyone. Say hello to Nadya,” he wrote. Kirov was a family favourite. Stalin inscribed a copy of his book On Lenin and Leninism: “To SM Kirov, my friend and beloved brother.” In 1926, Stalin removed Zinoviev from his Leningrad power base and promoted Kirov to take over Peter the Great’s capital, now the second largest Party in the State. He joined the Politburo in 1930.[12]

When Kirov asked if he could fly south to join him for the 1931 holidays, Stalin replied: “I have no right and would not advise anyone to authorize flights. I most humbly request you to come by train.” Artyom, often on these holidays, recalls, “Stalin was so fond of Kirov, he’d personally meet Kirov’s train in Sochi.” Stalin always had “a lovely time with Kirov,” even swimming and visiting the banya. Sometimes when Kirov swam, “Stalin went to the beach and sat waiting for Kirov,” says Artyom.

After Nadya’s death, Stalin’s friendship with “my Kirich” became more insistent. Stalin often called him in Leningrad at any time of the night: the vertushka phone can still be seen by Kirov’s bed in his apartment. When he came to Moscow, Kirov preferred to stay with Sergo, who was so fond of his boon companion that his widow remembered how he once faked a car crash to ensure that Kirov missed his train.[13] Yet Stalin and Kirov were “like a pair of equal brothers, teasing one another, telling dirty stories, laughing,” says Artyom. “Big friends, brothers and they needed one another.”[14]

This did not mean that Stalin completely trusted Kirov. In the autumn of 1929, Stalin orchestrated Pravda’s criticism of Kirov. However fond he was of Kirov, Stalin could also be cross with him. In June 1928, one of his articles seemed to have been edited when it appeared in Leningradskaya Pravda, provoking a letter that revealed Stalin’s thin-skinned paranoia on even small matters: “I understand . . . the technical reasons . . . Yet I’ve heard no other such examples of articles by Politburo members . . . It seems strange that the 40–50 words cut are the brightest about how the peasantry are a capitalist class . . . I await your explanation.”[15]

Kirov did not regard Stalin as a saint: during the 1929 birthday celebrations that raised Stalin to Vozhd, the Leningraders dared to mention Lenin’s views on Stalin’s rudeness.[16] Kirov knew Stalin’s unusual mentality well: when a student sent him some questions on ideology, he forwarded them to Kirov with this note: “Kirov! You must read the letter of student Fedotov . . . an absolutely politically illiterate young man. Maybe you will telephone him and talk to him, probably he is a corrupted drunken “Party member.” We must not introduce the GPU I think. By the way, the student is a very good trickster with an anti-Soviet face which he conceals artistically beneath a simple face that says ‘Help me understand. Maybe you understand all—I don’t.’ Greetings! Stalin.”[17] No doubt Kirov’s intimacy with Sergo, Kuibyshev and Mikoyan worried Stalin. The challenges of 1932—the Riutin Platform, Kirov’s possible resistance to Riutin’s execution, the famine, the suicide of Nadezhda—had shown Stalin needed firmer loyalty.

After Nadya’s death, Kirov was almost part of the family: Stalin insisted he stay with him, not Sergo. Kirov stayed at Stalin’s apartment so often he knew where the sheets and pillows were and he would bed down on the sofa. The children loved Kirov and sometimes when he was there, Svetlana would put on a doll show for him. Her favourite game was her own mock government. Her father was “First Secretary.” This Stalinette wrote orders like: “To my First Secretary, I order you to allow me to go with you to the theatre.” She signed it “The Mistress [or Boss— khozyaika] Setanka.” She hung the notes in the dining room above the telephone table. Stalin replied: “I obey.” Kaganovich, Molotov and Sergo were Setanka’s Second Secretaries, but “she has a special friendship with Kirov,” noticed Maria Svanidze, “because Joseph is so good and close with him.”[18]

Stalin returned to the ascetic Bedouin life of the underground Bolshevik, with the tension and variety of the revolutionary on the run, except that now his restless progress more resembled the train of a Mongol Khan. Though a creature of routine, he needed perpetual movement: there were beds in his houses but there were also big, hard divans in every room. “I never sleep on a bed,” he told a visitor. “Always a divan,” and on whichever one he happened to be reading. “Which historical person had the same Spartan habit?” he asked, answering with that autodidactic omniscience: “Nicholas I.” Nadya’s death naturally changed the way Stalin and his children lived.[19]

 

9. The Omnipotent Widower and His Loving Family:Sergo the Bolshevik Prince

Stalin could not bear to go on living in the Poteshny Palace apartment and the Zubalovo mansion because Nadya’s homes were too painful for him. Bukharin offered to swap apartments. Stalin accepted this comradely offer and moved into Bukharin’s apartment on the first floor of the triangular Yellow Palace, the old Senate,[20] roughly beneath his office. Since his office stood where the two wings of the Senate met at an angle, it was known to the cognoscenti as the “Little Corner.” Its polished floors, with their red and green carpets running down the centre, its wooden panelling up to shoulder height, its dreary drapes, were kept as clean and silent as a hospital. His secretary, Poskrebyshev, sat at the front of the anteroom, his desk immaculate, controlling access. Stalin’s office itself was long, airy and rectangular, heavy with drapes, and lined with ornate Russian stoves against which he would lean to ease the aching in his limbs. A huge desk stood at the far right corner while a long green baize table, with straightbacked chairs in white covers, stood to the left beneath portraits of Marx and Lenin.[21]

Downstairs, his “formal,” gloomy apartment with the “vaulted ceilings” was to be his Moscow residence until his death. “It was not like a home,” wrote Svetlana. It had once been a corridor. He expected the children to be there every evening when he returned for supper to review and sign their homework, like every parent. Until the war, he maintained this dutiful routine—some of his parental reports to the children’s teachers survive in the archive.

The children adored Zubalovo—it was their real home so Stalin decided not to uproot them but to build his own “wonderful, airy modern one-storey” dacha at Kuntsevo, nine kilometres from the Kremlin. This now became his main residence, until he died there twenty years later, developing over the years into a large but austere two-storey mansion, painted a grim camouflage green, with a complex of guardhouses, guest villas, greenhouses, a Russian bath and a special cottage for his library, all surrounded by pinewoods, two concentric fences, innumerable checkpoints and at least a hundred guards.[22] Here he indulged his natural craving for privacy, the external expression of his emotional detachment: no guards or servants stayed in the house; unless friends came for the night, he henceforth closed himself in, quite alone. Stalin drove out to Kuntsevo after dinner—it was so close it was often called “Nearby” by his circle because he also sometimes stayed at his other home, “Faraway,” at Semyonovskoe. The idyllic life went on at Zubalovo, Svetlana’s “paradise like an enchanted island.”

Stalin did not become a haunted hermit after Nadya’s death. It was true he spent ever more time with his male magnates, almost like the segregated court of a seventeenth-century Tsar. But the all-powerful widower also found himself in the loving but overwhelming embrace of a newly reconstructed family. Pavel and Zhenya Alliluyev, recently returned from Berlin, became his constant companions. Nadya’s sister Anna and her husband Stanislas Redens had returned from Kharkov for his new appointment as Moscow GPU boss. Redens, a handsome burly Pole with a quiff, always sporting his Chekist uniform, had been the secretary of the founder of the secret police, Dzerzhinsky. He and Anna fell in love during Stalin and Dzerzhinsky’s expedition to investigate the fall of Perm in 1919. Redens had a reputation among austere Old Bolsheviks of “putting on airs” and being a drinker because of an unfortunate incident. Until 1931, he had been Georgian GPU boss. However, his deputy, Beria, had, according to the family, outwitted Redens in a prank more worthy of a hearty stag night than a secret police intrigue—but it worked nonetheless. Beria got Redens drunk and sent him home naked. Family legends rarely tell the whole story: Stalin’s letters reveal that Redens and local bosses tried to have Beria removed to the Lower Volga but someone, probably Stalin, intervened. Beria never forgave him. But it was Redens, not Beria, who left Tiflis.

Stalin liked his cheerful brother-in-law but doubted his competence as a Chekist, removing him from the Ukraine. Anna, a loving mother to their two sons, was a good-natured but imprudent woman who, her own children admit, talked too much. Stalin called her “a chatterbox.”[23]

A third couple made up this sextet of loving relatives. Alexander “Alyosha” Svanidze, also just back from abroad, was the brother of Stalin’s first wife, Kato, who died in 1907. “Handsome, blond, with blue eyes and an aquiline nose,” he was a Georgian dandy, speaking French and German, who had helped rule Georgia in the 1920s and now held high rank in the State Bank. Stalin loved him—“they were like brothers,” wrote Mikoyan. His wife, Maria, was a Jewish Georgian soprano “with a tiny upturned nose, peaches and cream complexion and big blue eyes,” who was theprima donna in the full-time opera of her own life.[24] Svetlana said this glossy couple were brash, always bearing presents from abroad. That avid diarist, Maria, like all the ladies of Stalin’s court, seemed somewhat in love with their Vozhd. There was constant, bitchy competition for his favour among these ladies who were so busy feeling superior to, and undermining, the others that they often missed dangerous signs of Stalin’s seething moods.[25]

Meanwhile, Yakov, now twenty-seven, was qualifying as an electrical engineer though Stalin had wanted him to be a soldier. Yasha “resembled his father in voice and looks” but irritated him. Sometimes Stalin managed to show brisk affection: he sent him one of his books, The Conquest ofNature, inscribing it: “Yasha read this book at once. J. Stalin.”[26]

As Svetlana grew up into a freckly redhead, Stalin said she precisely resembled his mother, always the highest praise from him—but really, she was like him: intelligent, stubborn and determined. “I was his pet,” says Svetlana. “After mother’s death, he tried to be closer. He was very affectionate—he just wanted to see how I was doing. I do appreciate now that he was a very loving father . . .” Maria Svanidze recorded how Svetlana buzzed around her father: “He kissed her, admired her, fed her from his plate, selecting the best slices for her.” Svetlana, at seven, often declared: “Providing daddy loves me, I don’t care if the whole world hates me! If daddy told me, ‘fly to the moon,’ I’d do it!” Yet she found his affection stifling—“always that tobacco smell, puffing clouds of smoke with moustache and he was hugging and kissing me.” Svetlana was really raised by her beloved nanny, the sturdy Alexandra Bychkova, and the stalwart housekeeper, Carolina Til.[27]

A month after Nadya’s death, Artyom remembers that she was still asking when her mother would be back from abroad. Svetlana was terrified of the dark, which she believed was connected to death. She admitted that she could not love Vasily who was either bullying her, spoiling her fun, or telling her disturbing sexual details that she believed damaged her view of sex.

Vasily, now twelve, was the most damaged: “he suffered a terrible shock,” wrote Svetlana, “ruining him completely.” He became a truculent, name-dropping, violent lout who swore in front of women, expected to be treated as a princeling and yet was tragically inept and unhappy. He ran riot at Zubalovo. No one told Stalin of his outrageous antics. Yet Artyom says Vasily was really “kind, gentle, sweet, uninterested in material things; he could be a bully, but also defended smaller boys.” But he was terrified of Stalin whom he respected like “Christ for the Christians.” In the absence of his disappointed father, Vasily grew up in the sad, emotionally undernourished realm of rough and sycophantic secret policemen instead of loving but firm nannies. Pauker supervised this Soviet Fauntleroy. The Commandant of Zubalovo, Efimov, reported on him to Vlasik who then informed “the Master.”

Stalin trusted his devoted bodyguard, a brawny, hard-living but uncouth peasant, Nikolai Vlasik, thirty-seven, who had joined the Cheka in 1919 and guarded the Politburo, and then exclusively the Vozhd, since 1927. He became a powerful vizierat Stalin’s side but remained the closest thing to Vasily’s father figure: Vasily introduced his girlfriends to Vlasik for his approval.

When his behaviour at school became impossible, it was Pauker who wrote to Vlasik that his “removal to another school is absolutely necessary.” Vasily craved Stalin’s approval: “Hello father!” he wrote in a typical letter in which he talks in a childish version of Bolshevik jargon. “I’m studying at the new school, it’s very good and I think I’m going to become a good Red Vaska! Father, write to me how you are and how is your holiday. Svetlana is well and studies at school too. Greetings from our working collective. Red Vaska.”

But he also wrote letters to the secret policemen: “Hello Comrade Pauker. I’m fine. I don’t fight with Tom [Artyom]. I catch a lot [of fish] and very well. If you’re not busy, come and see us. Comrade Pauker, I ask you to send me a bottle of ink for my pen.” So Pauker, who was so close to Stalin that he shaved him, sent the ink to the child. When it arrived, Vasily thanked “Comrade Pauker,” claimed he had not reduced another boy to tears, and denounced Vlasik for accusing him of it. Already his life among schoolboys and secret policemen was leading the spoilt child to denounce others, a habit that could prove deadly for his victims in later life. The princely tone is unmistakable: “Comrade Efimov has informed you that I asked you to send me a shotgun but I have not received it. Maybe you forgot so please send it. Vasya.”

Stalin was baffled by Vasily’s insubordination and suggested greater discipline. On 12 September 1933, Carolina Til went on holiday, so Stalin, who was in the south, wrote the following instructions to Efimov at Zubalovo: “Nanny will stay at the Moscow home. Make sure that Vasya doesn’t behave outrageously. Don’t give him free playtime and be strict. If Vasya won’t obey Nanny and is offensive, keep him ‘in blinders,’ ” wrote Stalin, adding: “Take Vasya away from Anna Sergeevna [Redens, Nadya’s sister]—she spoils him by harmful and dangerous concessions.” While the father was on holiday, he sent his son a letter and some peaches. “Red Vaska” thanked him. Yet all was not well with Vasily. The pistol that had killed Nadya remained around Stalin’s house. Vasily showed it to Artyom and gave him the leather holster as a keepsake.[28]

It was only years later that Stalin understood how damaged the children had been by his absence and the care of bodyguards—what he called “the deepest secret in his heart”: “Children growing up without their mother can be raised perfectly by nannies but they can’t replace the mother...”[29]

In January 1933, Stalin delivered a swaggering Bolshevik rodomontade to the Plenum: the Five-Year Plan had been a remarkable success. The Party had delivered a tractor industry, electric power, coal, steel and oil production. Cities had been built where none stood before. The Dnieper River dam and power station and the Turk-Sib railway had all been completed (built by Yagoda’s growing slave labour force). Any difficulties were the fault of the enemy opposition. Yet this was Hungry Thirty-Three when millions more starved, hundreds of thousands were deported.

In July 1933, Kirov joined Stalin, Voroshilov, OGPU Deputy Chairman Yagoda and Berman, boss of Gulag, the labour camp system, on the ship Anokhin to celebrate the opening of a gargantuan project of socialist labour: the Baltic–White Sea Canal or, in Bolshevik acronym, the Belomor,[30] a 227-kilometre canal begun in December 1931 and completed by the Pharaonic slavery of 170,000 prisoners, of whom around 25,000 died in a year and a half. Voroshilov later praised Kirov and Yagoda for their contributions to this crime.[31]

By the summer, the magnates were exhausted after five years of Herculean labour in driving the triumphant Five-Year Plan, defeating the opposition and most of all, crushing the peasantry. After bearing such strain, they needed to relax if they were not going to crack—but even if the crisis of Hungry Thirty-Three had been weathered due to the massive repression, this was no time to rest. Sergo, who as People’s Commissar for Heavy Industry directed the Five-Year Plan, suffered heart and circulatory complaints—Stalin himself supervised his treatments.[32] Kirov was also breaking under the pressure, suffering from “irregular heartbeat . . . severe irritability and very poor sleep.” The doctors ordered him to rest.[33] Kirov’s friend Kuibyshev, Gosplan boss, who had the impossible task of making the planning figures work, was drinking and chasing women: Stalin complained to Molotov, later muttering that he had become “a debauchee.”[34]

On 17 August, Stalin and Voroshilov set off in their special train.[35] We know from an unpublished note that the Vozhd was already paranoid about his movements, fed up with his sister-in-law Anna Redens and keen for Klim to be more discreet: “Yesterday, around my sister-in-law (a chatter-box) and near the doctors (they gossip), I did not want to say my exact departure. Now I’m informing you that I’ve decided to go tomorrow . . . It’s not good to talk widely. We’re both tasty tidbits and we should not inform everyone by our openness. So if you agree, we go tomorrow at two. So I’ll order Yusis [Stalin’s Lithuanian bodyguard who shared duties with Vlasik] to immediately inform the chief of the railway station and order him to add one wagon, without information as to who it is for. Until tomorrow at two . . .” It was to be a most eventful holiday: there was even an assassination attempt.[36]

At Krasnaya Polyana, Sochi, Stalin found Lakoba, the Abkhazian chief, waiting on the veranda along with President Kalinin and Poskrebyshev. When Stalin and Lakoba strolled in the gardens, Beria, now effective viceroy of the Caucasus, joined them. Lakoba and Beria, already enemies, had come separately. After breakfast on the veranda, the Vozhd, followed by this swelling entourage, which was soon joined by Yan Rudzutak, a Latvian Old Bolshevik who headed the Control Commission but was increasingly distrusted by Stalin, toured his gardens.

“Stop being idle,” said the green-fingered Stalin. “The wild bushes here need to be weeded.” The grandees and the guards set to work, collecting wood and cutting brambles while Stalin, in his white tunic with baggy white trousers tucked into boots, supervised, puffing on his pipe. Taking a fork, he even did some weeding himself. Beria worked with a rake while one of the leaders from Moscow hacked with an axe. Beria seized the axe and, chopping away to impress Stalin, joked, with rather obvious double entendre: “I’m just demonstrating to the master of the garden, Joseph Vissarionovich, that I can chop down any tree.” No grandee was too big for Beria to fell. He would soon get the chance to wield his little axe.

Stalin sat down on his wicker chair and Beria perched behind him like a medieval courtier with the axe in his belt. Svetlana, who now called Beria “Uncle Lara,” was brought down to join them. When Stalin did some work on his papers, Lakoba listened to music on headphones while Beria called over to Svetlana, sat her on his knee and was photographed in a famous picture with his pince-nez glistening in the sun and his hands on the child, while the Master worked patiently in the background.

Voroshilov and Budyonny, who had also turned up, took Stalin, in the front seat of an open Packard, to inspect their horses bred by the army stud. They went on a cruise and then they went hunting, Stalin cheerfully carrying his rifle over his shoulder, with his hat on the back of his head, as his Chekist guard wiped the sweat off his forehead. After a day’s hunting, they pitched tents for an al fresco picnic and barbecue. Later, Stalin went fishing. The informality of the whole trip is obvious: it was one of the last times he lived like this.[37]

Meanwhile Stalin was outraged when, in his absence, Sergo managed to manipulate the Politburo against him. Kaganovich remained in charge as more and more leaders went on their holidays. He wrote to Stalin virtually every day, ending always with the same request: “Please inform us of your opinion.” The magnates were constantly fighting one another for resources: the tougher the struggle for collectivization, the faster the tempo of industrialization, the more accidents and mistakes made in the factories, the greater the struggle within the Politburo for control over their own fiefdoms. “Iron-Arse” Molotov, the Premier, rowed with Ordzhonikidze, the quick-tempered Heavy Industry Commissar, and Kaganovich who fought with Kirov who clashed with Voroshilov and so on. But suddenly, the Politburo united against Stalin’s own wishes.[38]

In the summer of 1933, Molotov received a report that a factory in Zaporozhe was producing defective combine harvester parts due to sabotage. Molotov, who agreed with Stalin that since their system was perfect and their ideology scientifically correct, all industrial mistakes must be the result of sabotage by wreckers, ordered Procurator-General Akulov to arrest the guilty. The local leaders appealed to Sergo. When the case came before the Supreme Court, the government was represented by the Deputy Procurator, an ex-Menshevik lawyer, Andrei Vyshinsky, who would be one of Stalin’s most notorious grandees in the coming Terror. But with Stalin on holiday, Sergo passionately defended his industrial officials and persuaded the Politburo, including Molotov and Kaganovich, to condemn Vyshinsky’s summing-up.

On 29 August, Stalin discovered Sergo’s mischief and fired off a telegram of Pharisaical rage: “I consider the position adopted by the Politburo incorrect and dangerous . . . I find it lamentable that Kaganovich and Molotov were not capable of resisting bureaucratic pressure from the People’s Commissariat of Heavy Industry.” Two days later, Kaganovich, Andreyev, Kuibyshev and Mikoyan officially annulled their resolution.

Stalin brooded about the danger of Sergo’s ability to use his undoubted prestige and force of personality to sway his potentates, letting off steam to Molotov: “I consider Sergo’s actions the behaviour of a hooligan. How can you have let him have his way?” Stalin was flabbergasted that Molotov and Kaganovich could have fallen for it. “What’s the matter? Did Kaganovich pull a fast one? . . . And he’s not the only one.” He fired off reprimands: “I’ve written to Kaganovich to express to him my astonishment that he found himself, in this case, in the camp of reactionary elements.”

Two weeks later, on 12 September, he was still ranting to Molotov that Sergo was showing anti-Party tendencies in defending “reactionary elements of the Party against the Central Committee.” He punished Molotov by calling him back from his holiday in the Crimea—“neither I nor Voroshilov like the fact that you’re vacationing for six weeks instead of two weeks”—and then felt guilty about it: “I am a little uncomfortable with being the reason for your early return,” he apologized but then showed his continuing anger with Kaganovich and Kuibyshev: “It’s obvious it would be rash to leave the centre’s work to Kaganovich alone (Kuibyshev may start drinking).”[39] Molotov miserably returned to Moscow.[40]

Stalin easily defeated Sergo but the vehemence of his attack on the “hooligan” shows how seriously he took the strongest leader after himself. Moody and excitable, yet the very personification of the tough Stalinist administrator, Sergo Ordzhonikidze was born in 1886, the son of Georgian nobility. Orphaned when he was ten, he was barely educated but trained incongruously as a nurse.[41] He had already joined the Party at seventeen and was arrested at least four times before joining Lenin in Paris in 1911, one of the few Stalinists to experience emigration (briefly). A member of the Central Committee since 1912 (like Stalin), he was personally responsible in 1921 for brutally annexing and Bolshevizing Georgia and Azerbaijan where he was known as “Stalin’s Arse.” Lenin attacked him for slapping a comrade and for indulging in drunken orgies with hussies but also defended him for his aggressive shouting by joking, “He does shout . . . but he’s deaf in one ear.”

In the Civil War, Sergo had been a dashing, leonine hero, at home on horseback (he was accused of riding a white horse through conquered Tiflis), so “young and strong,” it “seemed as if he had been born in his long military coat and boots.” He was explosively temperamental. In the early twenties, he actually punched Molotov in a row over Zinoviev’s book Leninism, an incident that demonstrates how seriously they took matters of ideology: Kirov had separated them. Sergo’s daughter, Eteri, recalls that this volcanic Georgian often got so heated that he slapped his comrades but the eruption soon passed—“he would give his life for one he loved and shoot the one he hated,” said his wife Zina.

Promoted to run the Control Commission in 1926, Sergo was Stalin’s most aggressive ally in the fight against the oppositions until he was placed in charge of Heavy Industry. He did not understand the subtleties of economics but he employed experts who did, driving them by charm and force. “You terrorize comrades at work,” complained one of his subordinates who were constantly appealing against his tempers. “Sergo really slapped them!” wrote Stalin approvingly to Voroshilov in 1928. “The opposition were scared!”

Sergo, who had flirted with, then betrayed Bukharin, was a forceful supporter of Stalin’s Great Turn—“he accepted the policy heart and soul,” said Kaganovich. Beloved by friends from Kaganovich to Bukharin and Kirov, Sergo was “the perfect Bolshevik,” thought Maria Svanidze, and “chivalrous” too, according to Khrushchev. “His kind eyes, grey hair and big moustache,” wrote Beria’s son, “gave him the look of an old Georgian prince.” Owing his career to Stalin, he remained the last big beast of the Politburo, sceptical about Stalin’s cult, with his own clientele in industry and the Caucasus whom he was capable of defending. He was certainly never afraid to disagree with Stalin[42] whom he treated like a prickly elder brother: sometimes he even gave him quasi-orders.

In September 1933, Sergo was holidaying in Kislovodsk, his favourite resort, whence he was soon in brisk correspondence with Stalin who resented this big-hearted “prince.” Sergo was, Stalin complained, “vain to the point of folly.”[43]

“Here on vacation,” Stalin wrote, “I do not sit in one place but move from one location to another . . .” After a month, Stalin moved southwards to his newly built house at Museri. Set atop a hill in a semi-tropical park, it was an ugly grey two-storey residence with his beloved wood panelling, expansive verandas, large dining room and a beautiful view down to a harbour where Lakoba had constructed a special jetty. It was surrounded by walks along serpentine paths that led to a round summerhouse, where Stalin worked, and down steps to the sea. Often Lakoba and Stalin strolled down to a nearby village where the locals laid on al fresco Abkhazian feasts.

On 23 September, Lakoba arranged a boating and shooting trip: Stalin and Vlasik motored along the coast from the specially built jetty on a motor yacht, Red Star, with their guns on their knees. Suddenly there was a burst of machine-gun fire from the coast.

 

 

10. Spoiled Victory: Kirov, the Plot and the Seventeenth Congress

Vlasik threw himself onto Stalin on the deck of the Red Star, requesting permission to return fire. Firing shots landwards, the boat turned to the open sea. Stalin initially thought it had just been Georgians firing a greeting but he changed his mind. He received a letter from the border guards admitting they had fired, mistaking it for a foreign vessel. Beria investigated personally, displaying his ruthlessness to get results which impressed Stalin. Yet he aroused suspicions that he had contrived the attack to undermine Lakoba, who was responsible for security inside Abkhazia. The guards were despatched to Siberia. Vlasik and Beria became closer to Stalin.[44]

Back on dry land, the entourage progressed into Gagra, where the GPU had found a new dacha in the hills which Lakoba had started to rebuild. This became a favourite residence, Kholodnaya Rechka, Coldstream, a Stalinist eyrie built on a cliff with views of dazzling natural beauty.[45] Returning to Sochi, Svetlana stayed with Stalin but when she went back to school, he found himself “like a lonely owl” and craved Yenukidze’s company.[46] “What keeps you in Moscow?” he wrote to Abel. “Come to Sochi, swim in the sea and let your heart rest. Tell Kalinin from me that he commits a crime if he doesn’t send you on holiday immediately . . . You could live with me at the dacha . . . I’ve visited the new dacha at Gagra today . . . Voroshilov and his wife are enchanted with it . . . Your Koba.”[47]

After this long holiday, the “lonely owl” returned to Moscow, on 4 November 1933, to plan the coming Congress of Victors which was to crown him for the triumphs of the last four years. Moscow felt as if it was waking up and stretching after a long nightmare. The famine was over. The harvest had improved. The starving millions were buried and forgotten in villages that had disappeared forever off the map.

There was much to celebrate as the delegates started to arrive for the Seventeenth Congress in late January. It must have been an exciting and proud time for the 1,966 voting delegates to be visiting Moscow from every corner of the sprawling workers’ paradise. The Congress was the highest Party organ, which theoretically elected the Central Committee to govern in its place until it met again, usually four years later. But by 1934, this was a pantomime of triumphalism, supervised by Stalin and Kaganovich, minutely choreographed by Poskrebyshev.

Nonetheless, a Congress was not all business: the Great Kremlin Palace was suddenly filled with outlandish costumes as bearded Cossacks, silk-clad Kazakhs and Georgians paraded into the great hall. Here the viceroys of Siberia, the Ukraine, or Transcaucasia renewed their contacts with allies in the centre while the younger delegates found patrons.[48] Lenin’s generation, who regarded Stalin as their leader but not their God, still dominated but the Vozhd took special care of his younger protégés.

He invited Beria, his blond wife Nina and their son to the Kremlin to watch a movie with the Politburo. Sergo Beria,[49] aged ten, and Svetlana Stalin, who would become friends, watched the cartoon Three Little Pigs with Stalin before they set off for Zubalovo where the Berias joined the magnates in feasting and singing Georgian songs. When Sergo Beria was cold, Stalin hugged him and let him snuggle into his coat lined with wolf fur before tucking him into bed. It must have been thrilling for Beria, the ambitious provincial entering the inner portals of power.

“STALIN!” gasped Pravda when he attended the Bolshoi. “The appearance of the ardently loved Vozhd, whose name is linked inseparably with all the victories scored by the proletariat, by the Soviet Union, was greeted with tumultuous ovations” and “no end of cries of ‘Hurrah!’ and ‘Long Live our Stalin!’ ”

However, some regional bosses had been shaken by Stalin’s brutal mismanagement. A cabal seems to have met secretly in friends’ apartments to discuss his removal. Each had their own reasons: in the Caucasus, Orakhelashvili was insulted by the promotion of the upstart Beria. Kosior’s cries for help in feeding the Ukraine had been scorned. Some of these meetings supposedly took place in Sergo’s flat in the Horse Guards where Orakhelashvili was staying. But who was to replace Stalin? Kirov, popular, vigorous and Russian, was their candidate. In the Bolshevik culture with its obsession with ideological purity, the former Kadet and bourgeois journalist with no ideological credentials, who owed his career to Stalin, was an unlikely candidate. Molotov, as loyal to Stalin as ever, sneered that Kirov was never a serious candidate.

When he was approached in Sergo’s apartment, Kirov had to consider fast what to do: he informed them that he had no interest in replacing Stalin but that he would be able to see that their complaints were heard. Kirov was still ill, recovering from flu, and his reaction shows that he lacked the stomach for this poisoned chalice. His immediate instinct was to tell Stalin, which he did, probably in his new apartment where he denounced the plot, repeated the complaints, and denied any interest in becoming leader himself.

“Thank you,” Stalin is supposed to have replied, “I won’t forget what I owe you.” Stalin was surely disturbed that these Old Bolsheviks considered “my Kirich” his successor. Mikoyan, Kirov’s friend, stated that Stalin reacted with “hostility and vengefulness towards the whole Congress and of course towards Kirov himself.” Kirov felt threatened but showed nothing publicly. Stalin concealed his anxiety.

In the Congress hall, Kirov ostentatiously sat, joking, with his delegation, not up on the Presidium, the sort of demagoguery that outraged Stalin, who kept asking what they were laughing about. His victory had been spoiled. Yet this constant struggling against traitors also suited his character and his ideology. No political leader was so programmed for this perpetual fight against enemies as Stalin, who regarded himself as history’s lone knight riding out, with weary resignation, on another noble mission, the Bolshevik version of the mysterious cowboy arriving in a corrupt frontier town.[50]

There was no hint of any of this in the public triumph: “Our country has become a country of mighty industry, a country of collectivization, a country of victorious socialism,” declared Molotov, opening the Congress on 26 January. Stalin enjoyed the satisfaction of watching his enemies, from Zinoviev to Rykov, old and new, praise him extravagantly: “The glorious field marshal of the proletarian forces, the best of the best—Comrade Stalin,” declared Bukharin, now editor of Izvestiya. But when Postyshev, another Old Bolshevik hardman, newly promoted to run the Ukraine, called Kirov, Congress gave him a standing ovation. Kirov rose to the occasion, mentioning Stalin (“the great strategist of liberation of the working people of our country and the whole world”) twenty-nine times, ending excitedly: “Our successes are really tremendous. Damn it all . . . you just want to live and live—really, just look what’s going on. It’s a fact!” Stalin joined the “thunderous applause.”

The last duty of a Congress was to elect the Central Committee. Usually this was a formality. The delegates were given the ballot, a list of names prepared by the Secretariat (Stalin and Kaganovich) who were proposed from the floor: Kirov had to propose Beria. The voters crossed out names they opposed and voted for the names left unmarked. As the Congress ended on 8 February, the delegates received their ballots but when the vote-counting commission started work, they received a shock. These events are still mysterious, but it seems that Kirov received one or two negatives while Kaganovich and Molotov polled over 100 each. Stalin got between 123 and 292 negatives. They were automatically elected but here was another blow to Stalin’s self-esteem, confirming that he rode alone among “two-faced double-dealers.”

When Kaganovich, managing the Congress, was informed by the voting commission, he ran to Stalin to ask what to do. Stalin almost certainly ordered him to destroy most of the negative votes (though naturally Kaganovich denied this, even in old age). Certainly 166 votes are still missing. On the 10th, the 71 CC members were announced: Stalin received 1,056 votes and Kirov 1,055 out of 1,059. The new generation, personified by Beria and Khrushchev, became members while Budyonny and Poskrebyshev were elected candidates. The Plenum of this new body met straight afterwards to do the real business.

Stalin devised a plan to deal with Kirov’s dangerous eminence, proposing his recall from Leningrad to become one of the four Secretaries, thereby cleverly satisfying those who wanted him promoted to the Secretariat: on paper, a big promotion; in reality, this would bring him under Stalin’s observation, cutting him off from his Leningrad clientele. In Stalin’s entourage, a promotion to the centre was a mixed blessing. Kirov was neither the first nor the last to protest vigorously—but, in Stalin’s eyes, a refusal meant placing personal power above Party loyalty, a mortal sin. Kirov’s request to stay in Leningrad for another two years was supported by Sergo and Kuibyshev. Stalin petulantly stalked out in a huff.

Sergo and Kuibyshev advised Kirov to compromise with Stalin: Kirov became the Third Secretary but remained temporarily in Leningrad. Since Kirov would have little time for Moscow, Stalin reached out to another newly elected CC member who would become the closest to Stalin of all the leaders: Andrei Zhdanov, boss of Gorky (Nizhny Novgorod), moved to Moscow as the Fourth Secretary.

Kirov staggered back to Leningrad, suffering from flu, congestion in his right lung and palpitations. In March, Sergo wrote to him: “Listen my friend, you must rest. Really and truly, nothing is going to happen there without you there for 10–15 days . . . Our fellow countryman [their code name for Stalin] considers you a healthy man . . . nonetheless, you must take a short rest!” Kirov sensed that Stalin would not forgive him for the plot. Yet Stalin was even more suffocatingly friendly, insisting that they constantly meet in Moscow. It was Sergo, not Stalin, with whom Kirov really needed to discuss his apprehensions. “I want awfully to have a chat with you on very many questions but you can’t say everything in a letter so it is better to wait until our meeting.” They certainly discussed politics in private, careful to reveal nothing on paper.[51]

There were hints of Kirov’s scepticism about Stalin’s cult: on 15 July 1933, Kirov wrote formally to “Comrade Stalin” (not the usual “Koba”) that portraits of Stalin’s photograph had been printed in Leningrad on rather “thin paper.” Unfortunately they could not do any better. One can imagine Kirov and Sergo mocking Stalin’s vanity.[52] In private,[53] Kirov imitated Stalin’s accent to his Leningraders.[54]

When Kirov visited Stalin in Moscow, they were boon companions but Artyom remembers a competitive edge to their jokes. Once at a family dinner, they made mock toasts: “A toast to Stalin, the great leader of all peoples and all times. I’m a busy man but I’ve probably forgotten some of the other great things you’ve done too!” Kirov, who often “monopolized conversations so as to be the centre of attention,” toasted Stalin, mocking the cult. Kirov could speak to Stalin in a way unthinkable to Beria or Khrushchev.

“A toast to our beloved leader of the Leningrad Party and possibly the Baku proletariat too, yet he promises me he can’t read all the papers—and what else are you beloved leader of ?” replied Stalin. Even the tipsy banter between Stalin and Kirov was pregnant with ill-concealed anger and resentment, yet no one in the family circle noticed that they were anything but the most loving of friends. However, the “vegetarian years,” as the poetess Anna Akhmatova called them, were about to end: “the meat-eating years” were coming.[55]

On 30 June, Adolf Hitler, newly elected Chancellor of Germany, slaughtered his enemies within his Nazi Party, in the Night of the Long Knives—an exploit that fascinated Stalin.

“Did you hear what happened in Germany?” he asked Mikoyan. “Some fellow that Hitler! Splendid! That’s a deed of some skill!” Mikoyan was surprised that Stalin admired the German Fascist but the Bolsheviks were hardly strangers to slaughter themselves.

 

 

11. Assassination of the Favourite

That summer, their own repression seemed to be easing. In May 1934, the Chairman of the OGPU, Menzhinsky, a shadowy scholar who had been permanently ill and spent most of his time in seclusion studying ancient manuscripts in any of the twelve languages of which he was master, died. The press announced that the hated OGPU had perished with him, swallowed by a new People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs—the NKVD. This aroused hopes that the dawning jazz age really did herald a new freedom in Russia—but the new Commissar was Yagoda who had been running the OGPU for some time.

The illusion of this thaw was confirmed when Yagoda came to Stalin and recited a poem by Osip Mandelstam, who, with his friend, the beautiful Leningrad poetess Anna Akhmatova, wrote verses with a searing emotional clarity which still shines through that twilight of humanity like beams of heart-rending honesty. Naturally they found it hard to conform with Soviet mediocrity.

Yagoda paid Mandelstam the back-handed compliment of learning the verse by heart, sixteen lines of poetry that damned and mocked Stalin as a bewhiskered “Kremlin crag-dweller” and “peasant-slayer” whose “fat fingers” were “as oily as maggots.” The poet Demian Bedny had complained to Mandelstam that Stalin left greasy fingermarks on the books he constantly borrowed. His fellow leaders were a “rabble of thin-necked bosses,” a line he wrote after noticing Molotov’s neck sticking out from his collar and the smallness of his head. Stalin was outraged—but understood Mandelstam’s value. Hence that heartless order to Yagoda that sounds as if it concerned a priceless vase: “Preserve but isolate.”

On the night of 16–17 May, Mandelstam was arrested and sentenced to three years’ exile. Meanwhile the poet’s friends rushed to appeal to his patrons among the Bolshevik magnates. His wife Nadezhda and fellow poet Boris Pasternak appealed to Bukharin atIzvestiya, while Akhmatova was received by Yenukidze. Bukharin wrote to Stalin that Mandelstam was a “first class poet . . . but not quite normal . . . PS: Boris Pasternak is utterly flabbergasted by Mandelstam’s arrest and nobody else knows anything.” Perhaps most tellingly, he reminded Stalin that “Poets are always right, history is on their side . . .”

“Who authorized Mandelstam’s arrest?” muttered Stalin. “Disgraceful.” In July, knowing that news of his interest would spread like ripples on a pond before the coming Writers’ Congress, Stalin telephoned Pasternak. His calls to writers already had their ritual. Poskrebyshev called first to warn the recipient that Comrade Stalin wished to speak to him: he must stand by. When the call arrived, Pasternak took it in his communal apartment and told Stalin he could not hear well since there were children yelling in the corridor.

“Mandelstam’s case is being reviewed. Everything will be all right,” Stalin said, before adding, “If I was a poet and my poet-friend found himself in trouble, I would do anything to help him.” Pasternak characteristically tried to define his concept of friendship which Stalin interrupted: “But he’s a genius, isn’t he?”

“But that’s not the point.”

“What is the point then?” Pasternak, who was fascinated by Stalin, said he wanted to come for a talk. “About what?” asked Stalin.

“About life and death,” said Pasternak. The baffled Stalin rang off. However, the most significant conversation took place afterwards, when Pasternak tried to persuade Poskrebyshev to put him through again. Poskrebyshev refused. Pasternak asked if he could repeat what had been said. The answer was a big yes.

Stalin prided himself on understanding brilliance: “He’s doubtless a great talent,” he wrote about another writer. “He’s very capricious but that’s the character of gifted people. Let him write what he wants, and when!”

Pasternak’s whimsy may have saved his life, for, later, when his arrest was proposed, Stalin supposedly replied: “Leave that cloud-dweller in peace.”[56]

Stalin’s intervention is famous but there was nothing new about it: as Nicholas I was for Pushkin, so Stalin was for all his writers. Stalin pretended he considered himself just a casual observer: “Comrades who know the arts will help you—I am just a dilettante”[57] but he was both gourmet and gourmand. His papers reveal his omnipotent critiques of writers, who wrote to him in droves.

Stalin’s ultimate pet writer was “the Proletarian Poet,” Demian Bedny, a Falstaffian rhymester, with good-natured eyes gazing out of a head “like a huge copper cauldron,” whose works appeared regularly in Pravda and who holidayed with Stalin, rendering an endless repertoire of obscene anecdotes. Rewarded with a Kremlin apartment, he was a member of the literary Politburo. But Bedny began to irritate Stalin: he bombarded him with complaints, and his egregious poems, in a long and farcical correspondence, while engaging in drunken escapades inside the Kremlin: “Ha-ha-ha! Chaffinch!” Stalin exclaimed on one such letter. Worse, Bedny stubbornly resisted Stalin’s criticisms: “What about the present in Russia?” Stalin scribbled to him. “Bedny leaves in the mistakes!”

“I agree,” added Molotov. “Must not be published without improvements.” Stalin was tired of his drunken poet and expelled him from the Kremlin: “There must be no more scandals inside the Kremlin walls,” he wrote in September 1932. Bedny was hurt but Stalin reassured him: “You must not see leaving the Kremlin as being sacked from the Party. Thousands of respected comrades live outside the Kremlin and so does Gorky!”[58]

Vladimir Kirshon was one of Gorky’s circle and another recipient of GPU funds who liked to send Stalin everything he wrote. When he was in favour, he could do no wrong: “Publish immediately,” Stalin scrawled on Kirshon’s latest article when returning it toPravda’s editor.

When Kirshon sent in his new play, Stalin read it in six days and wrote back: “Comrade Kirshon, your play’s not bad. It must be put on in the theatre at once.”[59] But Kirshon was being rewarded for his political loyalty: he was one of the hacks who viciously destroyed Bulgakov’s career.

However, after the creation of Socialist Realism, Kirshon wrote to Stalin and Kaganovich to ask if he was out of favour: “Why are you putting the question of trust?” Stalin replied by hand. “I ask you to believe the Central Committee is absolutely happy with your work and trusts you.”[60] The writers also turned to Stalin to sort out their feuds: Panferov wrote to Stalin to complain that Gorky was mocking his work. Stalin’s comment? “Vain. File in my archive. Stalin.”[61]

When he did not like a writer, he did not mince words: “Klim,” he wrote to Voroshilov about an article, “my impression: a first-rate chatterer who thinks he’s the Messiah. Yeah! Yeah! Stalin.”[62] When the American novelist Upton Sinclair wrote to Stalin asking him to release an arrested movie-maker, Stalin commented: “Green steam!”[63] Stalin’s favourite theatre was the Moscow Arts so he was gentler with its famous director, Stanislavsky, blaming his opinion on his colleagues. “I didn’t highly praise the play Suicide (by N. Erdman) . . . My nearest comrades think it empty and even harmful...”[64]

His “nearest comrades,” much less literary than he, became unlikely literary tyrants too: Stalin, Molotov and Kaganovich (an uneducated cobbler) decided artistic matters. Molotov turned on Bedny, for example, with an absurd mixture of personal threat and literary criticism. Bedny, a gossip, even dared to play Stalin off against Molotov who lectured him gravely:

“I read Stalin’s letter to you. I agree absolutely. It cannot be said better than by him . . .” Molotov warned him about rumours of disagreements between the leaders—“You did your bit too, Comrade Bedny. I didn’t expect such things. It’s not good for a proletarian poet . . .” Molotov even gave poetical advice: “It’s very pessimistic . . . you need to give a window through which the sun can shine (heroism of socialism).”[65]

Stalin often informed Gorky and other writers that he was correcting their articles with Kaganovich, a vision that must have horrified them. At the theatres, Stalin evolved a pantomime of giving his judgement on a new play which was followed to the letter by Kaganovich and Molotov. In the Politburo’s loge and the room behind it, the avant-loge, where they ate between acts, Stalin commented on the actors, plays, even the décor of the foyer. Every comment became the subject of rumours, myths and decisions that affected careers.

Stalin attended a new play on Peter the Great by Alexei Tolstoy, another newly returned émigré writer who, besides Gorky, was the richest author of the Imperium. Count Tolstoy, an illegitimate and renegade nobleman, had returned to Russia in 1923 where he was hailed as the “Worker-Peasant-Count.” This literary gymnast specialized in understanding Stalin, boasting, “You really do have to be an acrobat.” His Peter the Great play, On the Rack, was attacked by Bolshevik writers. Stalin left shortly before the end, accompanied to his car by the crestfallen director. Sensing Imperial disapproval, the play was attacked viciously inside the theatre until the director returned triumphantly to announce: “Comrade Stalin, in speaking with me, passed the following judgement: ‘A splendid play. Only it’s a pity Peter was not depicted heroically enough.’ ” Stalin received Tolstoy and gave him “the right historical approach” for his next project, a novel Peter the Great.

This routine was repeated exactly when Kaganovich rejected a new production by the avant-garde theatrical director Meyerhold and was pursued to his car by the disappointed artist. Yet he protected the Yiddish actor Solomon Mikhoels. Like eighteenth-centurygrands seigneurs, the magnates patronized their own theatres, their own poets, singers and writers, and defended their protégés[66] whom they “received” at their dachas and visited at home. “Everyone goes to see someone,” wrote Nadezhda Mandelstam in her memoirs that provide a peerless moral guide to this era. “There’s no other way.” But when the Party turned against their protégés, the grandees abandoned them swiftly.[67]

The artists were fascinated by Stalin: Pasternak longed to meet him. “Can I meet you?” wrote the poet Gidosh eagerly. Meyerhold appealed to Stalin for a meeting which he said would “lift my depression as an artist” and signed it “Loving you.”

“Stalin not here now,” wrote Poskrebyshev.[68]

On 30 July, a month after Hitler’s Night of the Long Knives, Stalin headed down to the Sochi dacha where he was meeting his old favourite, Kirov, who had no wish to be there, and his new one, Andrei Zhdanov, who must have been honoured to be invited. There were four of them because Zhdanov brought along his son, Yury, Stalin’s future son-in-law, a young man whom the Vozhd was to regard as an ideal Soviet man. They had gathered to write the new history of Russia.

Already ill and exhausted, Kirov was the sort of man who wanted to go camping and hunting with friends like Sergo. There was nothing relaxing about a holiday with Stalin. Indeed, escaping from holidays with Stalin was to become a common experience for all his guests. Kirov tried to get out of it but Stalin insisted. Kirov, realizing that “Stalin was conducting a struggle of wills,” could not refuse. “I’m not in a happy mood,” he told his wife. “I’m bored here . . . At no time can I have a quiet vacation. To hell with it.” This was hardly the attitude Stalin needed or expected from “my Kirich” but had he read such letters, they would have confirmed his already ambiguous feelings for Kirov.[69]

The three leaders and the boy “sat at a table on the balcony in gorgeous weather on the enclosed veranda” of the huge Sochi house with its courtyard and its small indoor pool for Stalin. Servants brought hors d’oeuvres and drinks. “The four of us came and went,” says Yury Zhdanov. “Sometimes we went into the study indoors, sometimes we went down the garden to the wooden summerhouse.” The atmosphere was relaxing and free and easy. In the breaks, Kirov took Yury picking blackberries which they brought back for Stalin and Zhdanov. Every evening Kirov returned to his dacha and the Zhdanovs to theirs. Sometimes the lonely Stalin went home with them. “There were no bodyguards, no accompanying vehicles, no NKVD cars,” says Yury Zhdanov. “There was just me in the front, next to the driver and my father and Stalin in the back.” They set off at dusk and when they turned on the lights, they saw two girls hitchhiking by the roadside.

“Stop!” said Stalin. He opened the door and let the girls get into the middle seats of the seven-seater Packard. The girls recognized Stalin: “That’s Stalin!” Yury heard one whisper. They dropped the girls off in Sochi. “That was the atmosphere of the time.” It was about to change.

However informal it might have been, Zhdanov, like Beria, was one of the few magnates who could have brought his son to attend a meeting with Stalin even though the teenager had known him since he was five. “Only Zhdanov received from Stalin the same kind of treatment that Kirov enjoyed,” explained Molotov. “After Kirov, Stalin loved Zhdanov best. He valued him above everyone else.”[70]

Attractive, brown-eyed, broad-chested and athletic, though asthmatic, Zhdanov was always hearty and smiling, with a ready supply of jokes. Like Kirov, a sunny companion, he loved to sing and play the piano. Zhdanov already knew Stalin well. Born at the Black Sea port of Mariupol in 1896, Andrei Alexandrovich Zhdanov, a hereditary nobleman (like Lenin and Molotov), was the scion of Chekhovian intellectuals. Son of a Master of Religious Studies at the Moscow Religious Academy, who worked, like Lenin’s father, as an inspector of public schools (his thesis was “Socrates as Pedagogue”), and of a mother who had graduated from the Moscow Musical Conservatoire and was herself the daughter of a rector of a religious academy, Zhdanov was the sole representative in top Party circles of the nineteenth-century educated middle class. His mother, a gifted pianist, taught Zhdanov to play well too.

Zhdanov studied at a church school (like Stalin), dreamed of being an agriculturalist, then at twenty attended the Junior Officers’ Training College in Tiflis. This “acquainted him with Georgian culture and songs.” He grew up with three sisters who became Bolsheviks: two of them never married and became revolutionary maiden aunts who lived in his house, dominating Zhdanov and greatly irritating Stalin. Joining the Party in 1915, Zhdanov won his spurs in the Civil War as a commissar, like so many others. By 1922, he ran Tver, then Nizhny Novgorod, whence he was called to greater things.

Straitlaced and rigid in Party matters, his papers reveal a man of meticulous diligence who could not approach a subject without becoming an encyclopaedic expert on it. Despite never completing higher education though he attended Agricultural College, Zhdanov was another workaholic obsessive, who voraciously studied music, history and literature. Stalin “respected Zhdanov,” says Artyom, “as his fellow intellectual,” whom he constantly telephoned to ask: “Andrei, have you read this new book?”

The two were always pulling out volumes of Chekhov or Saltykov-Shchedrin to read aloud. Jealous rivals mocked his pretensions: Beria nicknamed him “The Pianist.” Zhdanov and Stalin shared religious education, Georgian songs, a love of history and classical Russian culture, autodidactic and ideological obsessions, and their sense of humour—except that Zhdanov was a prig.[71] He was personally devoted to Stalin whom he called “Joseph Vissarionovich” but never “Koba.” “Comrade Stalin and I have decided . . .” was his favourite pompous way to begin a meeting.[72]

On the veranda or in the summerhouse, they discussed history, epoch by epoch, on a table spread with revolutionary and Tsarist history textbooks. Zhdanov took notes. The supreme pedagogue could not stop showing off his knowledge.[73] Their mission was to create the new history that became the Stalinist orthodoxy.

Stalin adored studying history, having such happy memories of his history teacher at the Seminary that he took the trouble in September 1931 to write to Beria: “Nikolai Dmitrievich Makhatadze, aged 73, finds himself in Metechi Prison . . . I have known him since the Seminary and I do not think he can present a danger to Soviet power. I ask you to free the old man and let me know the result.”[74] He had been a history addict ever since. In 1931, Stalin decisively intervened in academia to create the historical precursor of “Socialist Realism” in fiction: henceforth, history was not what the archives said but what the Party decreed on a holiday like this. “You speak about history,” Stalin told his magnates. “But one must sometimes correct history.” Stalin’s historical library was read and annotated thoroughly: he paid special attention to the Napoleonic Wars, ancient Greece, nineteenth-century relations between Germany, Britain and Russia, and all Persian Shahs and Russian Tsars. A born student, he always mugged up on the history of that day’s issue.[75]

While Zhdanov was in his element in the discussions in Sochi, Kirov was out of his depth. It is said that Kirov tried to escape by saying, “Joseph Vissarionovich, what kind of a historian am I?”

“Nevermind. Sit down,” replied Stalin, “and listen.” Kirov got so sunburnt he could not even play gorodki: “However strange, for most of the day, we are busy. This isn’t what I expected for recreation. Well, to Hell with it,” he wrote to a friend in Leningrad. “I’ll just take to my heels as soon as possible.” Yet Yury Zhdanov recalled “happy warmth” between Stalin and Kirov who swapped earthy jokes which Zhdanov received in prim silence. Yury still remembers Stalin’s Jesus joke: they were working in the summerhouse, which stood under a big oak tree, when Stalin glanced at his closest friends: “Look at you here with me,” he said, pointing at the tree. “That’s the Mamre tree.” Zhdanov knew from his Bible that the Mamre tree was where Jesus assembled his Apostles.[76]

There may have been a more sinister development that worried Kirov: some time when he was out of town, Moscow tried to remove his trusted NKVD boss in Leningrad, Medved, a close family friend, and replace him with a thuggish ex-criminal, Evdokimov, one of Stalin’s rougher drinking pals on southern holidays. Stalin was trying to loosen Kirov’s local patronage, and perhaps even control his security. Kirov refused to accept Evdokimov.[77]

As Kirov headed back to Leningrad, Stalin despatched Zhdanov to Moscow to supervise the first Writers’ Congress. This was Zhdanov’s first test, which he passed with flying colours, managing, with Kaganovich’s help, to cope with Gorky’s demands and Bukharin’s hysteria. Zhdanov reported every detail to Stalin in twenty-page letters in a fastidious hand that showed their close relationship and the younger man’s new eminence. (There seems to have been an unspoken competition among his men to write the longest letters: if so, Zhdanov was the winner.) Like a schoolboy to his tutor, Zhdanov boasted of his good work: “The opinion of all the writers—ours and foreigners—was good. All the sceptics who predicted failure now have to admit the colossal success. All the writers saw and understood the Party’s attitude.” He admitted, “the Congress cost me a lot in terms of my nerves but I think I did it well.” Stalin appreciated his openness about his weaknesses.[78] Once the Congress was over, Zhdanov even had to apologize to Stalin that “I didn’t write to you. Congress took so much time . . .” but he also apologized for writing “such a long letter— I can’t do it any other way.”

By now the other leaders had gone off on holiday: “Molotov, Kaganovich, Chubar and Mikoyan left today. Kuibyshev, Andreyev and me stayed.” Zhdanov, not even a Politburo candidate, and new in the Secretariat, was left in charge of the country, signing decrees himself. Here was another sign that the Politburo’s importance was shrinking: proximity to Stalin was the source of real power.[79] Soviet Russia was enjoying its last months of oligarchy and approaching the first of dictatorship.[80]

Zhdanov, one of the more fragile of Stalin’s workhorses, was exhausted: “I ask for one month’s holiday in Sochi . . . I feel very tired,” he wrote to Stalin. Of course he would work on their beloved history: “During the holiday, I’d like to look through the textbooks on history . . . I’ve already looked through the second-level textbooks—not good. A big greeting to you, dear Comrade Stalin!”[81]

What was Stalin’s mood in this calm before the storm? He was frustrated by the NKVD’s blunders and the “whining” of Party bigwigs. On 11 September, Stalin complained to Zhdanov and Kuibyshev about misguided secret-police coercion: “Find out all the mistakes of the deduction methods of the workers of the GPU . . . Free persecuted persons who are innocent if they are innocent and . . . purge the OGPU of people with specific ‘deduction methods’ and punish them all—‘whoever they may be’ [in Stalin’s words: ‘without looking at their faces’].”[82]

A few days later, a sailor defected to Poland. Stalin immediately ordered Zhdanov and Yagoda to enforce the punishment of the sailor’s family: “Inform me at once that 1. members of sailor’s family were arrested and 2. if not, then who is guilty for the mistake [of not having done so] in our Organs and has the culprit been punished for this betrayal of the Motherland?” The tension was rising too in his relationship with Kirov.[83]

On 1 September, Stalin despatched the Politburo around the countryside to check the harvest: Kirov was sent to Kazakhstan where there was a strange incident which might have been an assassination attempt or meant to resemble one. The circumstances are murky but when he returned to Leningrad, four more Chekists were added to his NKVD guard, bringing it to about nine men who worked in shifts at different locations. This made Kirov one of the most guarded of all the Soviet leaders and he did not like it, sensing it was another attempt to separate him from his trusted local Chekists, particularly his bodyguard Borisov, middle-aged and overweight but loyal. After their tour, Sergo and Voroshilov joined Stalin on holiday while Zhdanov inspected Stalingrad, whence he managed another thirteen-page letter, showing his toughness by demanding, “Some workers must be sent to trial here.” He signed off heartily: “A hundred times: Devil curse the details!”

When Stalin returned to Moscow on 31 October, he again longed to see Kirov who was arguing against Stalin’s plan to end bread rationing on which he depended to feed Leningrad’s huge population. Kuibyshev was Kirov’s ally: “I need your support,” he wrote from Leningrad. On 3 November, Maria Svanidze recorded Stalin arriving in his apartment with Kaganovich while the “absurd fat” Zhdanov ran along behind him. He rang a reluctant Kirov and invited him to Moscow “to defend the interests of Leningrad.” Stalin gave the phone to Kaganovich who “talked Kirov into coming down.” Maria said that Stalin really just wanted to “go to the steambath and joke around with him.”

A few days later, Kirov drove out with Stalin and his son Vasily to Zubalovo to watch a puppet show put on by Svetlana, and then played billiards. Khrushchev, attending the Politburo as a rising star, witnessed “an exchange of sharp words” between Stalin and Kirov. Khrushchev was shocked that the Vozhd behaved “disrespectfully to another Party member.” Svanidze noticed Stalin was “in a bad mood.” Kirov anxiously returned to Leningrad: he longed to discuss the rising tension with his friend: “I haven’t seen Sergo in such a long time.” [84]

On 7 November, there was another sign of the apparent thaw. At the diplomatic reception in the Andreevsky Hall, presided over by Stalin, Kalinin and Voroshilov, the traditional Red Army oompah band packed up and were replaced, to the amazement of all, by Antonin Ziegler and his Jazz Revue. The wild swing music seemed completely out of place and no one knew whether they should dance or not. Then the light-footed Voroshilov, who was taking dancing lessons in cabaret jazz, started to foxtrot strenuously with his wife Ekaterina Davidovna. [85]

On 25 November, Kirov rushed back to Moscow for the Plenum, hoping to consult with Ordzhonikidze.[86] Sergo did not make it to the Plenum. Earlier that month, visiting Baku with Beria, he was suddenly taken ill after dinner. Beria took Sergo back to Tiflis by train. After the 7 November parade, Sergo fell ill again with intestinal bleeding, then suffered a serious heart attack. The Politburo sent three specialists down to examine him but they were confounded by his mysterious symptoms. Sergo was nonetheless determined to return for the Plenum but Stalin formally ordered him to “strictly fulfill doctor’s instructions and not return to Moscow before 26 November. Don’t take your illness lightly. Regards. Stalin.”

When Beria was involved, it was indeed foolish to take one’s illnesses lightly: Stalin perhaps did not want Sergo and Kirov to meet at the Plenum. Beria, who had offered to use his axe for Stalin, was already aware of the Leader’s disillusionment with Sergo. He was to prove adept with poisons. Indeed, the NKVD already boasted a secret department of medical poisoners under Dr. Grigory Maironovsky but Beria needed little help in such matters. He truly brought the venom of the Borgias to the court of the Bolsheviks.[87]  But Stalin himself brooded about poison; reflecting on venomous intrigues at the eighteenth-century Persian court, which he was studying, he had earlier scribbled on his pad during a Politburo meeting: “Poison, poison, Nadir Khan.”[88]

After the Plenum, on the 28th, Stalin personally escorted Kirov to the Red Arrow train, embracing him in his compartment.[89] Kirov was back at work in Leningrad the next day. On 1 December, he started work at home, preparing a speech, then, wearing his worker’s peaked cap and raincoat, he set off from his apartment on foot to his office. He entered the grand neoclassical Smolny Institute by the public entrance. At 4:30 p.m., Kirov, followed by his bodyguard Borisov, walked up to his third-floor office. Old Borisov fell behind, either from unfitness or being strangely delayed by some Chekists from Moscow who appeared at the door.

Kirov turned right out of the stairwell and passed a dark-haired young man named Leonid Nikolaev, who pressed himself against the wall to let Kirov pass—and then trailed along behind him. Nikolaev pulled out a Nagan revolver and shot Kirov from three feet away in the back of the neck. The bullet passed through his cap. Nikolaev turned the pistol on himself and squeezed the trigger, but an electrician working nearby somehow knocked him down and the second bullet hit the ceiling. Borisov the guard staggered up breathlessly, gun drawn impotently. Kirov fell face down, head turned to the right, his cap’s peak resting on the floor, and still gripping his briefcase—a Bolshevik workaholic to the last.

Several minutes of chaos followed in which witnesses and police ran in every direction, seeing the same events differently and giving conflicting evidence: even the gun was variously seen on the floor and in the assassin’s hand. There seems to be a special sort of miasma in the air at terrible events and this one was no different. What matters is that Kirov lay lifeless on the floor near the unconscious Nikolaev. Kirov’s friend Rosliakov knelt beside him, lifting his head and whispering: “Kirov, Mironich.” They lifted Kirov, with Rosliakov holding his lolling head, on to a conference table, with the blood seeping from his neck leaving a trail of heroic Bolshevik sacrament down the corridor. They loosened his belt and opened his collar. Medved, the Leningrad NKVD boss, arrived but was stopped at the door by Moscow Chekists.

Three doctors arrived, including a Georgian, Dzhanelidze. All declared Kirov dead but they still kept on giving him artificial respiration until almost 5:45 p.m. Doctors in totalitarian states are terrified of eminent dead patients—and with good reason. As the doctors surrendered, those present realized that someone would have to tell Stalin. Everyone remembered where they were when Kirov was assassinated: the Soviet JFK.[90]

---

[1] Papers showing Yenukidze’s role: GARF 7523c.149a.2.1–6 including report of Professor Kushner document 7. The staff gossip and the official version: GARF 3316.2.2016.1–8. Appeal of A. G. Korchagina to Kalinin for pardon. She was arrested 1935 for membership of terrorist group. “Oh Nadya, Nadya”: Mgeladze, pp. 117–8. “Overturned my life”: Nadya Vlasik.

[2] GARF 7523c.149a.2.10–11. Stalin’s questions: Svetlana, Twenty Letters, p. 120.

[3] Kaganovich, p. 73.

[4] Natalya A. Andreyeva. GARF 7523c.149a.2.10–11. Svetlana, Twenty Letters, p. 119.

 

[5] The funeral: Artyom Sergeev, Kira Alliluyeva, Natalya Andreyeva, Vladimir Alliluyev. Based on the photographs in RGASPI 667.1.42.23–4. MR, pp. 173–5. Larina, pp. 141–2. Svetlana, Twenty Letters , pp. 119–20. Kaganovich, p. 73. The speech: GARF 7523c.149.2.8–10. “Oh Nadya, Nadya”: Mgeladze, pp. 117–8.

[6] Stalin changed: Kaganovich, p. 154. RGASPI 74.1.429.65–66, diary E. D. Voroshilova, 21 June 1954. Spitting on the wall: Zhenya Alliluyeva’s account to Kira Alliluyeva.

[7] Maria “Marusya” Svanidze was to become a vital figure in Stalin’s entourage: her handwritten diary, which is one of the most revealing documents of the thirties, was preserved by Stalin in his own archive.

[8] Budyonny had lost his first wife in a possible suicide, perhaps when she discovered his relationship with his future second wife, the singer Olga. Ironically the other Soviet leader whose wife had committed suicide was the brilliant commander most hated by Stalin—Mikhail Tukhachevsky.

[9] RGASPI 74.2.38.80, Stalin to Voroshilov 17 Dec. 1932. Resignation: Svetlana, Twenty Letters, p. 120. Rosliakov, quoted in Kirov, p. 158. RGASPI 558.11. 787.10, Postyshev to Stalin and reply 28 Dec. 1932. Svanidze diaries, 28 Dec. 1934, 21 Dec. 1935 and 9 May 1935. Interview with Nina Budyonny, 5 Dec. 2001. The suicide changed history: Leonid Redens. Letters to Stalin on Nadya: RGASPI 558.11.1551.38–42, workmates of Alliluyeva to Stalin 17 Nov. 1932. RGASPI 558.11.1551.31–5, poem translated by Vano Byrkhimova sent to Stalin. RGASPI 558.11.1551.44–5, V. M. Kazanovsky to Poskrebyshev and Stalin to Poskrebyshev 27 Mar. 1948. Svetlana, Twenty Letters, p. 120: Stalin could not live without Nadya. Svanidze diary, 8 Dec. 1934. Visits to Stalin’s office: November 1932: IA.

[10] It was therefore entirely appropriate that the Mariinsky should be renamed the Kirov after his death.

[11] Artyom Sergeev—memories of Stalin and Kirov.

[12] Kirov, pp. 1–76: this sketch of Kirov is based on Amy Knight’s excellent account, Who Killed Kirov?—along with the author’s research in RGASPI and interviews with survivors. RGASPI 558.11.746.53, Kirov to Stalin in Kislovodsk 5 July 1925. Stalin wants Kirov all the time: Svanidze diary, 13 Dec. 1934.

 

[13] Faked car crashes, often with fatal effects, were to become a bizarre feature of Stalin’s rule.

[14] Kirov, pp. 130–1.

[15] RGASPI 558.11.746.82, Stalin to Kirov 6 June 1928.

[16] Kirov, p. 139.

[17] RGASPI 558.11.746.131, Stalin to Kirov 21 July 1932.

[18] Kirov: staying the night at Stalin’s—Artyom Sergeev. Svetlana performs for Kirov: Svanidze diary, 14 Nov. 1934. Tensions with Sergo Ordzhonikidze: see Kaganovich Perepiska, pp. 276–7 in 1932 and Molotov Letters in 1933, p. 234.

[19] Moving divans and Nicholas I: Charkviani, p. 35. Moving around in the south: Stalin to G. Dmitrov 25 Oct. 1934, in Alexander Dallin and F. I. Firson (eds.), Dmitrov and Stalin, 1934–1943 (henceforth Dmitrov/Stalin), p. 22.

[20] President Putin still rules from this building, the seat of power in Russia since Lenin. Putin’s Chief of Staff works in Stalin’s old office. Until 1930, Stalin kept his main office on the fifth floor of the grey granite edifice of the Central Committee building on Old Square, up the hill from the Kremlin, where he had been well served by his successive secretaries, Lev Mekhlis, who went on to greater things, and Tovstukha, who died prematurely. It was here that Stalin planned his campaigns against Trotsky, Zinoviev and Bukharin. In 1930, Poskrebyshev and the Special Sector, the fulcrum of Stalin’s dictatorship, moved into the Yellow Palace (also known as the Sovnarkom or Council of Ministers building) where the Politburo met, Stalin worked— and now lived.

[21] Stalin’s spartan décor: Svetlana OOY, pp. 345–70. Little Corner: Stalin’s office, see Shtemenko in Bialer (ed.), p. 353. Security: RGASPI 17.162.9.54, quoted in Khlevniuk, Circle, p. 51. On Lenin: Service, pp. 400–1. Visits to Bedny, see Sudoplatov, p. 52. Beggar: MR, pp. 14, 213. Moving to Bukharin’s flat: Svetlana, Twenty Letters , p. 130. Artyom Sergeev in interview and quoted, with Molotov, in MR, pp. 10–11. RGASPI 558.11.801.42–43, Redens to Stalin 14 Nov. 1930.

[22] Pavel and Zhenya Alliluyev return from Berlin: Kira Alliluyeva. Svetlana RR. Redens “tough, airs”: Svetlana, Twenty Letters , p. 64. Redens replaced in Ukraine by Balitsky; Kaganovich Perepiska, pp. 276–7. Redens ruined: Sergo B, pp. 21, 47. Leonid and Vladmir Redens. Chatterbox Anna: RGASPI 74.2.38.89, Stalin to Voroshilov, n.d.

[23] Kuntsevo was, like most of his other residences, built by Merzhanov: Stalin constantly ordered renovations and, after the war, the second floor. After his death, the contents were packed up but under Brezhnev, these were reassembled by Stalin’s reunited staff. It remains today closed up under the aegis of the FSB security organ, but exactly as it was when Stalin lived, even down to his shaving brushes and gramophone.

[24] They saddled their son with the absurd Bolshevik name Johnreed in honour of the author of Ten Days That Shook the World.

[25] Mikoyan, p. 357. Svanidzes: see Maria’s diary on family, 5 Mar. 1937; Maria’s poem to Stalin, RGASPI 44.1.1.361–6. “Better looking than 70% of wives/anyone who meets me remembers me forever”: RGASPI 44.1.1.340–4, Maria Svanidze to Alyosha Svanidze. RGASPI 44.1.1.403, Alyosha to Maria on Mikoyan, Sergo and Yenukidze 9 Nov. 1930. RGASPI 44.1.1.417, Nadya Alliluyeva to Maria Svanidze on “babas,” 11 Jan. 1926. Svanidzes: Svetlana, Twenty Letters, pp. 81–7.

[26] RGASPI 558.3.4, Stalin to Yakov. Resembled father: Vlasik, p. 27.

[27] Svetlana RR. Svanidze diary, 15 Apr. 1935. This account of the family circle and living arrangements after Nadya’s death is based on the following sources: author’s interviews with Artyom Sergeev, Kira Alliluyeva, Vladimir Alliluyev (Redens), Leonid Redens. Stepan Mikoyan. Svetlana RR. Svetlana, Twenty Letters, p. 130. Svanidze diaries, Sept. 1933 and 4 Oct. 1934. Stalin’s distrust of Anna the chatterer: see RGASPI 74.2.38.89, n.d., Stalin to Voroshilov, and also see Stalin’s letter to Commandant Efimov about Vasily. On Svanidze and Stalin, Mikoyan, pp. 357–8: brothers.

[28] Vlasik, pp. 25–7. Interview with Nadezhda Vlasik. Letters of V. Stalin, J. Stalin, Commandant S. Efimov, K. Pauker, 1933–8, quoted in A. Sukhomlinov, Vasily: Syn Vozhdya (henceforth Vasily ), pp. 28–30, 51. On Vasily’s sexual tales to Svetlana: Svetlana RR. The pistol: Artyom Sergeev.

[29] Mgeladze, p. 117.

[30] Belomor cigarettes now became one of the most popular brands, smoked by Stalin himself when his favourite Herzogovina Flor were not to hand. The Belomor Canal was one of the triumphs that were celebrated by writers and film-makers; Gorky, the novelist who had become a shameful apologist for the worst excesses of Bolshevism, edited a book, The Canal Named for Stalin, that amazingly praised the humanitarian aspects of Belomor.

[31] Tucker, Power, pp. 200–203. Kirov, pp. 148–9. Anne Applebaum, GULAG, pp. 78–83.

[32] RGASPI 85.1.144.

[33] Kirov, pp. 167–8.

[34] Kuibyshev’s womanizing and drinking: Oleg Troyanovsky. See also Stalin to Molotov: Molotov Letters, p. 233. Stalin to Molotov 1 Sept. 1933 and 12 Sept. 1933.

[35] We are especially well informed on this holiday because not only do we have Stalin’s correspondence with Kaganovich, in charge in Moscow, but the GPU took photographs which they mounted in a special album for Stalin, and Lakoba, the host in Abkhazia, also kept notes: therefore we have both sound and vision.

[36] RGASPI 74.2.38.89, Stalin to Voroshilov, n.d.

[37] Nadezhda Vlasik. Beria, pp. 47–53. S. Lakoba, Ocherki po politicheskoy istorii Abkhazii, pp. 117–8. Stalin’s album, RGASPI 558.11.1668. Moving around: Stalin to Dmitrov 25 Oct. 1934 in Dmitrov/Stalin p. 22. Kaganovich Perepiska, pp. 308–20.

[38] RGASPI 558.11.765.72. Mikoyan to Stalin 12 Sept. 1931. Khlevniuk, Circle, pp. 83–97.

[39] Khlevniuk, Circle, pp. 94–7. Molotov Letters, pp. 233, 234. Kaganovich Perepiska, pp. 315–23.

[40] Molotov Letters, p. 233. Stalin to Molotov, 1 and 12 Sept. 1933. Also see RGASPI 79.1.798, Molotov to Kuibyshev 12 Sept. 1933.

[41] After WW2, Stalin reminisced about how, in exile, “I, as a peasant, was given 8 roubles monthly. Ordzhonikidze as a nobleman got 12 roubles so deported noblemen cost the Treasury 50% more than peasants.” The other trained male nurse in the leadership was Poskrebyshev.

[42] Stalin treated Sergo like an uncontrollable younger brother: “You were trouble-making this week,” Stalin wrote typically to him, “and you were successful. Should I congratulate you or not?” On another occasion: “Tomorrow, the meeting on bank reform. Are you prepared? You must be.” When Stalin scolded him, he added, “Don’t dress me down for being rude . . . Actually, tell me off as much as you like.” He usually signed himself “Koba.” Sergo’s notes almost always disagree with some decision of Stalin’s: “Dear Soso,” he carped in one note, “is the new Russia being built by Americans?” He was quite capable of giving Stalin instructions too: “Soso, they want to put Kaganovich on civil aviation . . . Write to Molotov and Kaganovich and tell them not to!”

[43] Stalin and Sergo: “Congratulate you or not?” RGASPI 558.11.778.48, Stalin to Sergo 15 Jan. 1931. “Are you prepared?” RGASPI 558.11.778.45, Sergo to Stalin. “Finish with Right,” RGASPI 558.11.778.40, Sergo to Stalin 26 Sept. 1930. RGASPI 81.3.99.27/8, Stalin to Sergo 9 September 1931. The archives are full of evidence of Sergo’s temper and complaints about it: for example, RGASPI 558.11.737.65. A. Ikramov (Uzbekistan) to Stalin 12 June 1935: “No questions were solved because of Comrade Ordzhonikidze . . . he scolded me and accused me of all possible things. Some things I can’t even repeat . . . I think such behaviour incorrect and I ask you to receive me . . .” Stalin approves Sergo: “Really slapped them,” RGASPI 74.2.38.25, Stalin to Voroshilov 10 Feb. 1928. Khlevniuk, Ordzhonikidze, pp. 7–16, 21–4, 158, quoting E. M. Bogdateva on his strength. On the fight: MR, p. 113. His frenzies: S. R. Gershberg in Khlevniuk, p. 149. Eteri Ordzhonikidze. Killing those he hated: Mikoyan, p. 332. Orlov, p. 185. Chivalrous: KR, p. 107. Easter, pp. 59–62.; Kaganovich: Sergo “I’m kissing you,” pp. 63, 162. Perfect Bolshevik: Svanidze diary, 5, 1937. Stalin on Beria and Sergo (vanity): Kaganovich Perepiska, pp. 92, 276. On holiday to Kislovodsk:Kaganovich Perepiska, p. 326, and letters to and from Stalin, pp. 340, 342. Stalin on Sergo’s nobility: Charkviani, p. 23. “Prince”: Sergo B, p. 15.

[44] Beria, pp. 47–53. Lakoba, pp. 117–8. Stalin’s album, RGASPI 558.11.1668. Moving around: Stalin to Dmitrov 25 Oct. 1934 in Dmitrov/Stalin , p. 22. Fasil Iskander, Sandro of Chegem. Author’s visit to Museri, 2002.

[45] The Gagra house is one of the most beautiful of Stalin’s residences but also the least accessible. The children later got their own houses. A snake path of steps twists down to the sea. Yet it is invisible from the land. Like most of these houses, it is still under the control of the Abkhazian presidential security, hidden, eerie but perfectly preserved. Museri adjoins the same secret CC resort, Pitsunda, where Khrushchev had a house as First Secretary and where, in the eighties, Mikhail Gorbachev and Raisa his wife were criticized for building a multi-million-pound holiday house. All remain empty yet guarded in the steamy Abkhazian heat.

[46] Gagra house: RGASPI 558.11.728.40–2, Stalin to Yenukidze 13 Sept. 1933. Author’s visit to Kholodnaya Rechka, Gagra, 2002. Stalin in Gagra: Kaganovich Perepiska, p. 378. See also, later, Averell Harriman and other visitors.

[47] RGASPI 558.11.728.40–2, Stalin to Yenukidze 13 Sept. 1933.

[48] These provincials wanted to meet their heroes and a great amount of time was spent posing for the photographers in the hall where they gathered in eager groups, beaming, in their boots, tunics and caps, around Stalin, Kalinin, Voroshilov, Kaganovich and Budyonny. At the Fifteenth Congress in 1927, Stalin was just one of the leaders who posed with his fans. At the Seventeenth, Stalin is always at the centre. The album is mutilated by the huge number of figures either crossed out or cut out as they were arrested and executed during the following four years: out of 1,966 delegates, 1,108 would be arrested. Few survived.

[49] Named, of course, after Beria’s former patron, Ordzhonikidze, a friendship that had disintegrated into mutual hatred.

[50] It was no coincidence that he would become such a fan of Western cowboy movies.

[51] This account of the Congress is based on Amy Knight’s Kirov, pp. 127, 171–7, plus KR I, p. 77. Kaganovich, pp. 70–1. Sergo B, p. 17. On proposal of Beria to CC: Kirov warned Stalin: Mgeladze, p. 178. Khlevniuk downplays the relevance of the CC votes story. Tucker, Power, pp. 260–3. Khlevniuk, Circle, pp. 117–23. M. Rosliakov, Ubiistvo Kirova, pp. 28–33. Radzinsky, pp. 297–300.

[52] RGASPI 558.11.746, Kirov to Stalin 15 July 1933.

[53] Among his possessions in his apartment, preserved in Leningrad, is one of his cigarette boxes emblazoned with an unprepossessing portrait of Stalin with a very long nose. The box is opened by pressing the nose.

[54] Rosliakov in Kirov, p. 160.

[55] “My Kirich,” RGASPI 558.11.746.85, Stalin to Kirov 6 Mar. 1929. Calls to Kirov: Svanidze diary, 4 Oct. 1934. Kirov, pp. 158–9, 186. Jokes about “leader of the proletariat,” Artyom Sergeev. Kirov—centre of attention, Sergo B, p. 15.

[56] Mikoyan, p. 534. Anna Akhmatova quoted in Figes, Natasha, pp. 482–5. Tucker, Power, pp. 260–3, 273. KGB Lit. Archive, pp. 175–6. Mandelstam, pp. 23–4, 82, 112–3, 117, 145–7, 158. Radzinsky, pp. 300–1. RGASPI 558.11.806.117, Stalin to Stavsky on writer Sobolev and creative caprice, 10 Dec. 1935.

[57] RGASPI 558.1.5374, Stalin to K. Stanislavsky 9 Nov. 1931.

[58] RGASPI 558.11.702.6–12 and 41a and 69, expulsion from Kremlin, 4 Sept. 1932. RGASPI 558.11.702.35, Molotov to Bedny cc Stalin 12 Dec. 1930. “Copper Cauldron”: KR I, pp. 79–80.

[59] RGASPI 558.11.754.1–21, V. Kirshon to Stalin and Stalin to Mekhlis 20 Oct. 1932. Kirshon to Stalin and Stalin to Kirshon 9 and 15 Oct. 1932. Reliable writers listed for Stalin: RGASPI 558.11.815, Y. Yakovlev to Stalin 3 July 1933. Pilniak: RGASPI 558.11.786.50.1, Stalin to Pilniak 7 Jan. 1931.

[60] RGASPI 558.11.754.26, Kirshon to Stalin and Kaganovich and Stalin to Kirshon 13 Aug. 1933. Kirshon and Bulgakov in Curtis, pp. 69–71: Kirshon and Leopold Averbakh, ex-head of RAPP and closely connected to Yagoda, attacked Bulgakov’s play Flightand had its run cancelled in early 1929. It was then that Bulgakov, unable to work, appealed to Stalin.

[61] RGASPI 558.11.786. 9–13, Panferov to Stalin 25 Feb. 1934.

[62] When Stalin read Andrei Platonov’s satire on the “Higher Command” of collectivization, For Future Use, he supposedly wrote “Bastard!” on the manuscript and told Fadeev, “Give him a belt ‘for future use.’ ” Platonov was never arrested but died, in great deprivation, of TB.

[63] “Yeah! Yeah!”: RGASPI 74.2.37, Stalin to Voroshilov, 15 Mar. 1931. “Green steam”: Upton Sinclair to Stalin and Stalin to Sinclair, also commenting on Eisenstein: RGASPI 558.11.804.12, 26 Oct. 1931.

[64] RGASPI 558.1.5374, Stalin to K. Stanislavsky 9 Nov. 1931.

[65] RGASPI 558.11.702.6–12, 41a, 69, Expulsion from Kremlin 4 Sept. 1932. RGASPI 558.11.702.35, Molotov to Bedny cc Stalin 12 Dec. 1930. KR I, pp. 79–80. Kaganovich Perepiska, pp. 149, 164.

[66] There was one other returned émigré whom Stalin personally favoured. Ilya Ehrenburg, a Muscovite and Jewish Bohemian novelist, friends with Picasso and Malraux, complained of persecution by the Party. His old schoolfriend Bukharin appealed for him. Stalin scrawled on the letter: “To Comrade Kaganovich, pay attention to the attached document—don’t let the Communists drive Ehrenburg mad. J. Stalin.” Molotov and Bukharin helped Mandelstam. Voroshilov aided his own stable as well as his “court painter” Gerasimov. Kirov protected the Mariinsky Ballet, Yenukidze the Bolshoi. Yagoda patronised his own writers and architects, often meeting them at Gorky’s mansion. Poskrebyshev received the tenor Kozlovsky at home.

[67] RGASPI 558.11.710.24, Bukharin to Stalin and Stalin to Kaganovich on Ehrenburg 9 Aug. 1935. Tolstoy: Tucker, Power, pp. 114–18, 282–320. See the excellent chapter in Nikolai Tolstoy, The Tolstoys. Kaganovich, pp. 105–7. Mandelstam, p. 164. Stalin at the theatre: see Curtis, pp. 250–1, for Bulgakov’s feelings on Stalin’s comments.

[68] RGASPI 558.11.775.99, Meyerhold to Stalin. On Pasternak, see Mandelstam, p. 148. RGASPI 558.11.725.130, Gidosh to Stalin 2 Sept. 1932. Bedny and Babel: Kaganovich Perepiska, pp. 122, 149.

[69] Kirov, pp. 179–81: Rosliakov, Kirov to Maria Lvovna.

 

[70] This account is based on Yury Zhdanov. Mikoyan, p. 562. MR , pp. 221–2. Artyom Sergeev. Zubok, pp. 112–7.

[71] His wife Zinaida was even prissier: she once told Svetlana Stalin that the urbane novelist Ehrenburg “loves Paris because there are naked women there.” It was Zinaida who was tactless enough to tell Svetlana her mother was mentally “sick.”

[72] Zhdanov: Yury Zhdanov. Martha Peshkova. RGASPI 77: Zhdanov papers. For relationship with Stalin, see RGASPI 558.11.730.2–9, Zhdanov to Stalin, n.d. 1934. RGASPI 558.11.83.143, Kaganovich and Zhdanov to Stalin 23 Aug. 1934, RGASPI 558.11.86.2–16, Zhdanov to Stalin 3 Sept. 1934. RGASPI 558.11.730.18, Zhdanov to Stalin 6 Sept. 1934. “Have you read this new book?” Stalin to Zhdanov, according to Zhdanov’s aide, A. Belyakov, quoted in Rybin, Oktyabr 1941, p. 51. Weak, intellectual, wanted to be agriculturalist, picked books with Stalin, prim, loved flowers: Svetlana OOY, pp. 360–2. Zubok, pp. 112–7.

[73] Yury Zhdanov, the boy at table with Stalin, Kirov and his father, is the main source for this account and now lives in Rostov-on-Don where he generously agreed to be interviewed for this book. The holiday became famous because of Kirov’s fate soon afterwards: it forms a set piece in Anatoly Rybakov’s novel Children of the Arbat . Yury Zhdanov remembers Stalin asking him: “What was the genius of Catherine the Great?” He answered his own question. “Her greatness lay in her choice of Prince Potemkin and other such talented lovers and officials to govern the State.”

[74] RGASPI 558.11.76.113, Stalin to Beria 19 Sept. 1931. Chinsky, p. 47.

[75] Stalin to Dmitrov, changing history: Dmitrov diary, 7 April 1934, p. 14. A selection of Stalin’s intensely annotated history books includes Kutuzov: RGASPI 558.3.25.2. D’Abernon’s Ambassador of the World: RGASPI 558.3.25.32. Vipper’s History of Greece: RGASPI 558.3.36. Von Moltke,German–French War of 1870: RGASPI 558.3.224. Ivan the Terrible : “Teacher” RGASPI 558.3.350.

[76] When the writer Mikhail Sholokhov criticized the praise for the leader, Stalin replied with a sly smile, “What can I do? The people need a god.”

[77] Mamre tree, warm atmosphere: Yury Zhdanov. Sholokhov: Gromov, Vlast i Iskusstvo, p. 144. Jokes, Zhdanov shocked: Artyom Sergeev. “Take to my heels”: Kirov to Chudov in Kirov, p. 181. E. G. Evdokimov to replace Philip Medved as Leningrad NKVD boss: Kirov, p. 161: D. B. Sorokin, Medved’s brother-in-law. Evdokimov: see Robert Conquest, Inside Stalin’s Secret Police, NKVD Politics 1936–1939, p. 25.

[78] RGASPI 558.11.730.2–9, Zhdanov to Stalin, n.d. 1934. RGASPI 558.11.83.143, Kaganovich and Zhdanov to Stalin 23 Aug. 1934. RGASPI 558.11.86.2–16, Zhdanov to Stalin 3 Sept. 1934. RGASPI 558.11.730.18, Zhdanov to Stalin 6 Sept. 1934. Zhdanov to Stalin: “Before the Congress, Gorky once again tried to criticize the lists even though they’d been agreed with them before . . . he complained Kamenev was not elected to the Secretariat. He did not want to go to the Congress or chair the Plenum. Pity . . . he’s very tired.” RGASPI 558.11.730.1, Stalin to Kaganovich, Zhdanov, Stetsky and Mekhlis 24 Aug. 1934. Kaganovich reported on Gorky’s demands and how the entire leadership of himself, Molotov, Voroshilov and Zhdanov had coped. RGASPI 558.11.742.21, Kaganovich to Stalin 12 Aug. 1934 and RGASPI 558.11.742.28, Kaganovich to Stalin 12 Aug. 1934.

[79] After the Seventeenth Congress, formal Politburo meetings became gradually less frequent. Often a Politburo sitting was really just Stalin chatting with a couple of comrades: Poskrebyshev’s minutes are simply marked “Comrades Stalin, Molotov, Kaganovich—for” and the others were sometimes telephoned by Poskrebyshev who marked their votes and signed his “P” underneath. By the end of the year, there was one meeting in September, none in October and one in November.

[80] RGASPI 558.11.730.10, Zhdanov to Stalin Sept. 1934. PB sittings: Khlevniuk, Circle, p. 122.

[81] RGASPI 558.11.730.37–40, Zhdanov to Stalin 1 Sept. 1935.

[82] RGASPI 558.11.730.21, Stalin to Zhdanov and Kuibyshev 11 Sept. 1934.

[83] RGASPI 558.11.730.22, Stalin to Zhdanov, Yagoda and Akulov 9 Oct. 1934.

[84] Destinations of the leaders are found in Kaganovich’s letter to Stalin of 1 Sept.: RGASPI 558.11.50.64 Kaganovich Perepiska, p. 470. Kaganovich writes from Kiev. Kirov headed out to Kazakhstan, Mikoyan to Kursk, Chubar to the Middle Volga, Kaganovich to Ukraine, Zhdanov to Stalingrad, Voroshilov to Belorussia and Molotov to Siberia. M. D. Borisov was the bodyguard. RGASPI 79.1.170.1,2, 3, Kirov to Kuibyshev 18 Sept. 1934 and 23 Sept. 1934. KR I, p. 61. Kirov, p. 185. RGASPI 558.11.730.23–36, Zhdanov to Stalin 8 Oct. 1934: Zhdanov reported to Stalin that there were bread-collecting problems in the Stalingrad region: “Some workers must be sent to trial there,” he wrote on 8 Oct. The Party leaders down there were “weak.” Kirov to Moscow: Kirov, pp. 183–4. Call and arrival, Stalin in bad mood: Svanidze diary, 14 and 26 Nov. 1934.

[85] S. Frederick Starr, Red and Hot, The Fate of Jazz in the Soviet Union 1917–80, p. 126. Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism, pp. 94–5

[86] Kirov, p. 187.

[87] Khlevniuk, Ordzhonikidze, pp. 65–6. Poison: Sudoplatov, pp. 270–1.

[88] RGASPI 558.11.27.24, Stalin notes, 7 May 1929.

[89] Rybin, Ryadom, pp. 14–16.

[90] This account is based on Amy Knight’s excellent reconstruction in her Who Killed Kirov?, pp. 88–99; Tucker, Power , pp. 288–96; Conquest, Great Terror, pp. 43–61, as well as Kaganovich, MR, Svanidze’s diary, Mikoyan’s memoirs, Tak bylo.