STALIN:
THE COURT OF THE RED TSAR
BY
SIMON
SEBAG MONTEFIORE
PROLOGUE
THE HOLIDAY DINNER 8 NOVEMBER 1932
At around 7 p.m. on 8 November 1932, Nadya Alliluyeva
Stalin, aged thirty-one, the oval-faced and brown-eyed wife of the Bolshevik
General Secretary, was dressing for the raucous annual party to celebrate the fifteenth
anniversary of the Revolution. Puritanical, earnest but fragile, Nadya prided
herself on her “Bolshevik modesty,” wearing the dullest and most shapeless
dresses, draped in plain shawls, with square-necked blouses and no makeup. But
tonight, she was making a special effort. In the Stalins’ gloomy apartment in
the two-storey seventeenth-century Poteshny Palace, she twirled for her sister,
Anna, in a long, unusually fashionable black dress with red roses embroidered
around it, imported from Berlin. For once, she had indulged in a “stylish
hairdo” instead of her usual severe bun. She playfully placed a scarlet tea
rose in her black hair.
The party, attended by all the Bolshevik magnates,
such as Premier Molotov and his slim, clever and flirtatious wife, Polina,
Nadya’s best friend, was held annually by the Defence Commissar, Voroshilov: he
lived in the long, thin Horse Guards building just five steps across a little
lane from the Poteshny. In the tiny, intimate world of the Bolshevik élite,
those simple, cheerful soirées usually ended with the potentates and their
women dancing Cossack jigs and singing Georgian laments. But that night, the
party did not end as usual.
Simultaneously, a few hundred yards to the east,
closer to Lenin’s Mausoleum and Red Square, in his office on the second floor
of the triangular eighteenth-century Yellow Palace, Joseph Stalin, the General
Secretary of the Bolshevik Party and the Vozhd—the leader—of the
Soviet Union, now fifty-three, twenty-two years Nadya’s senior, and the father
of her two children, was meeting his favoured secret policeman. Genrikh Yagoda,
Deputy Chairman of the GPU,[1] a ferret-faced Jewish
jeweller’s son from Nizhny Novgorod with a “Hitlerish moustache” and a taste
for orchids, German pornography and literary friendships, informed Stalin of
new plots against him in the Party and more turbulence in the countryside.
Stalin, assisted by Molotov, forty-two, and his
economics chief, Valerian Kuibyshev, forty-five, who looked like a mad poet,
with wild hair, an enthusiasm for drink, women and, appropriately, writing
poetry, ordered the arrest of those who opposed them. The stress of those
months was stifling as Stalin feared losing the Ukraine itself which, in parts,
had descended into a dystopia of starvation and disorder. When Yagoda left at
7:05 p.m., the others stayed talking about their war to “break the back” of the
peasantry, whatever the cost to the millions starving in history’s greatest
man-made famine. They were determined to use the grain to finance their
gargantuan push to make Russia a modern industrial power. But that night, the
tragedy would be closer to home: Stalin was to face a personal crisis that was
the most wounding and mysterious of his career. He would replay it over and
over again for the rest of his days.
At 8:05 p.m., Stalin, accompanied by the others,
ambled down the steps towards the party, through the snowy alleyways and
squares of that red-walled medieval fortress, dressed in his Party tunic, baggy
old trousers, soft leather boots, old army greatcoat and his wolf shapka with
earmuffs. His left arm was slightly shorter than the other but much less
noticeable than it became in old age—and he was usually smoking a cigarette or
puffing on his pipe. The head and the thick, low hair, still black but with
specks of the first grey, radiated the graceful strength of the mountain men of
the Caucasus; his almost Oriental, feline eyes were “honey-coloured” but
flashed a lupine yellow in anger. Children found his moustache prickly and his
smell of tobacco acrid, but as Molotov and his female admirers recalled, Stalin
was still attractive to women with whom he flirted shyly and clumsily.[2]
This small, sturdy figure, five feet, six inches tall,
who walked ponderously yet briskly with a rough pigeon-toed gait (which was
studiously aped by Bolshoi actors when they were playing Tsars), chatting
softly to Molotov in his heavy Georgian accent, was only protected by one or
two guards. The magnates strolled around Moscow with hardly any security. Even
the suspicious Stalin, who was already hated in the countryside, walked home
from his Old Square office with just one bodyguard. Molotov and Stalin were
walking home one night in a snowstorm “with no bodyguards” through the Manege
Square when they were approached by a beggar. Stalin gave him ten roubles and
the disappointed tramp shouted: “You damned bourgeois!”
“Who can understand our people?” mused Stalin. Despite
assassinations of Soviet officials (including an attempt on Lenin in 1918),
things were remarkably relaxed until the June 1927 assassination of the Soviet
Ambassador to Poland, when there was a slight tightening of security. In 1930,
the Politburo passed a decree “to ban Comrade Stalin from walking around town
on foot.” Yet he continued his strolling for a few more years. This was a
golden age which, in just a few hours, was to end in death, if not murder.[3]
Stalin was already famous for his Sphinxian
inscrutability, and phlegmatic modesty, represented by the pipe he
ostentatiously puffed like a peasant elder. Far from being the colourless
bureaucratic mediocrity disdained by Trotsky, the real Stalin was an energetic
and vainglorious melodramatist who was exceptional in every way.
Beneath the eerie calm of these unfathomable waters
were deadly whirlpools of ambition, anger and unhappiness. Capable both of
moving with controlled gradualism and of reckless gambles, he seemed enclosed
inside a cold suit of steely armour but his antennae were intensely sensitive
and his fiery Georgian temper was so uncontrollable that he had almost ruined
his career by unleashing it against Lenin’s wife. He was a mercurial neurotic
with the tense, seething temperament of a highly strung actor who revels in his
own drama—what his ultimate successor, Nikita Khrushchev, called a litsedei,
a man of many faces. Lazar Kaganovich, one of his closest comrades for over
thirty years who was also on his way to the dinner, left the best description
of this “unique character”: he was a “different man at different times . . . I
knew no less than five or six Stalins.”
However, the opening of his archives, and many newly
available sources, illuminate him more than ever before: it is no longer enough
to describe him as an “enigma.” We now know how he talked (constantly about
himself, often with revealing honesty), how he wrote notes and letters, what he
ate, sang and read. Placed in the context of the fissiparous Bolshevik
leadership, a unique environment, he becomes a real person. The man inside was
a super-intelligent and gifted politician for whom his own historic role was
paramount, a nervy intellectual who manically read history and literature, and
a fidgety hypochondriac suffering from chronic tonsillitis, psoriasis,
rheumatic aches from his deformed arm and the iciness of his Siberian exile. Garrulous,
sociable and a fine singer, this lonely and unhappy man ruined every love
relationship and friendship in his life by sacrificing happiness to political
necessity and cannibalistic paranoia. Damaged by his childhood and abnormally
cold in temperament, he tried to be a loving father and husband yet poisoned
every emotional well, this nostalgic lover of roses and mimosas who believed
the solution to every human problem was death, and who was obsessed with
executions. This atheist owed everything to priests and saw the world in terms
of sin and repentance, yet he was a “convinced Marxist fanatic from his youth.”
His fanaticism was “semi-Islamic,” his Messianic egotism boundless. He assumed
the imperial mission of the Russians yet remained very much a Georgian,
bringing the vendettas of his forefathers northwards to Muscovy.
Most public men share the Caesarian habit of detaching
themselves to admire their own figures on the world stage, but Stalin’s
detachment was a degree greater. His adopted son Artyom Sergeev remembers
Stalin shouting at his son Vasily for exploiting his father’s name. “But I’m a
Stalin too,” said Vasily.
“No, you’re not,” replied Stalin. “You’re not Stalin
and I’m not Stalin. Stalin IS Soviet power. Stalin is what he is in the newspapers
and the portraits, not you, no not even me!”
He was a self-creation. A man who invents his name,
birthday, nationality, education and his entire past, in order to change
history and play the role of leader, is likely to end up in a mental
institution, unless he embraces, by will, luck and skill, the movement and the
moment that can overturn the natural order of things. Stalin was such a man.
The movement was the Bolshevik Party; his moment, the decay of the Russian
monarchy. After Stalin’s death, it was fashionable to regard him as an
aberration but this was to rewrite history as crudely as Stalin did himself.
Stalin’s success was not an accident. No one alive was more suited to the
conspiratorial intrigues, theoretical runes, murderous dogmatism and inhuman
sternness of Lenin’s Party. It is hard to find a better synthesis between a man
and a movement than the ideal marriage between Stalin and Bolshevism: he was a
mirror of its virtues and faults.[4]
Nadya was excited because she was dressing up. Only
the day before at the Revolution Day parade, her headaches had been agonizing
but today she was cheerful. Just as the real Stalin was different from his
historical persona, so was the real Nadezhda Alliluyeva. “She was very
beautiful but you can’t see it in photographs,” recalls Artyom Sergeev. She was
not conventionally pretty. When she smiled, her eyes radiated honesty and
sincerity but she was also po-faced, aloof and troubled by mental and physical
illnesses. Her coldness was periodically shattered by attacks of hysteria and
depression. She was chronically jealous. Unlike Stalin, who had a hangman’s
wit, no one recalls Nadya’s sense of humour. She was a Bolshevik, quite capable
of acting as Stalin’s snitch, denouncing enemies to him. So was this the
marriage of an ogre and a lamb, a metaphor for Stalin’s treatment of Russia
itself ? Only insomuch as it was a Bolshevik marriage in every sense, typical
of the peculiar culture that spawned it. Yet in another way, this is simply the
commonplace tragedy of a callous workaholic who could not have been a worse
partner for his self-centred and unbalanced wife.
Stalin’s life appeared to be a perfect fusion of
Bolshevik politics and family. Despite the brutal war on the peasants and the
increasing pressure on the leaders, this time was a happy idyll, a life of
country weekends at peaceful dachas, cheerful dinners in the Kremlin, and
languid warm holidays on the Black Sea that Stalin’s children would remember as
the happiest of their lives.
Stalin’s letters reveal a difficult but loving
marriage: “Hello, Tatka . . . I miss you so much Tatochka—I’m as lonely as a
horned owl,” Stalin wrote to Nadya, using his affectionate nickname for her, on
21 June 1930. “I’m not going out of town on business. I’m just finishing up my
work and then I’m going out of town to the children tomorrow . . . So goodbye,
don’t be too long, come home sooner! My kisses! Your Joseph.” [5]
Nadya was away taking treatment for her headaches in
Carlsbad, Germany. Stalin missed her and was keeping an eye on the children,
like any other husband. On another occasion, she finished her letter: “I ask
you so much to look after yourself! I am kissing you passionately just as you
kissed me when we were saying goodbye! Your Nadya.”[6]
It was never an easy relationship. They were both
passionate and thin-skinned: their rows were always dramatic. In 1926, she took
the children to Leningrad, saying she was leaving him. But he begged her to
return and she did. One feels these sorts of rows were frequent but there were
intervals of a kind of happiness, though cosiness was too much to hope for in
such a Bolshevik household. Stalin was often aggressive and insulting but it
was probably his detachment that made him hardest to live with. Nadya was proud
and severe but always ailing. If his comrades like Molotov and Kaganovich
thought her on the verge of “madness,” her own family admitted that she was
“sometimes crazed and oversensitive, all the Alliluyevs had unstable Gypsy
blood.” The couple were similarly impossible. Both were selfish, cold with
fiery tempers, though she had none of his cruelty and duplicity. Perhaps they
were too similar to be happy. All the witnesses agree that life with Stalin was
“not easy—it was a hard life.” It was “not a perfect marriage,” Polina Molotova
told the Stalins’ daughter Svetlana, “but then what marriage is?”[7]
After 1929, they were often apart since Stalin
holidayed in the south during the autumn when Nadya was still studying. Yet the
happy times were warm and loving: their letters fly back and forth with
secret-police couriers and the notes follow each other in such quick succession
that they resemble e-mails. Even among these ascetic Bolsheviks, there were
hints of sex: the “very passionate kisses” she recalled in her letter quoted
above. They loved each other’s company: as we have seen, he missed her bitterly
when she was away and she missed him too. “It’s very boring without you,” she
wrote. “Come up here and it’ll be nice together.”[8]
They shared Vasily and Svetlana. “Write anything about
the children,” wrote Stalin from the Black Sea. When she was away, he reported:
“The children are good. I don’t like the teacher, she’s running round the place
and she lets Vasya and Tolika [their adopted son, Artyom] rush around morning
till night. I’m sure Vaska’s studies will fail and I want them to succeed in
German.” She often enclosed Svetlana’s childish notes.[9] They shared their
health worries like any couple. When Stalin was taking the cure at the Matsesta
Baths near Sochi, he reported to her: “I’ve had two baths and I will have ten .
. . I think we’ll be seriously better.”
“How’s your health?” she inquired.
“Had an echo on my lungs and a cough,” he replied. His
teeth were a perennial problem: “Your teeth—please have them treated,” she told
him. When she took a cure in Carlsbad, he asked caringly: “Did you visit the
doctors—write their opinions!” He missed her but if the treatment took longer,
he understood.[10]
Stalin did not like changing his clothes and wore
summer suits into winter so she always worried about him: “I send you a
greatcoat because after the south, you might get a cold.”[11] He sent her presents
too: “I’m sending you some lemons,” he wrote proudly. “You’ll like them.” This
keen gardener was to enjoy growing lemons until his death.[12]
They gossiped about the friends and comrades they saw:
“I heard Gorky [the famous novelist] came to Sochi,” she wrote. “Maybe he’s
visiting you—what a pity without me. He’s so charming to listen to . . .”[13] And of course, as a
Bolshevik handmaiden living in that minuscule wider family of magnates and
their wives, she was almost as obsessed about politics as he was, passing on
what Molotov or Voroshilov told her[14]. She sent him books and
he thanked her but grumbled when one was missing. She teased him about his
appearances in White émigré literature.
The austerely modest Nadya was not afraid of giving
orders herself. She scolded her husband’s saturnine chef de cabinet Poskrebyshev
while on holiday, complaining that “we didn’t receive any new foreign
literature. But they say there are some new ones. Maybe you will talk to Yagoda
[Deputy GPU boss]... Last time we received such uninteresting books...”[15] When she returned
from the vacation, she sent Stalin the photographs: “Only the good ones—doesn’t
Molotov look funny?” He later teased the absurdly stolid Molotov in front of
Churchill and Roosevelt. He sent her back his own holiday photographs.[16]
However, by the late twenties, Nadya was
professionally discontented. She wanted to be a serious Bolshevik career woman
in her own right. In the early twenties, she had done typing for her husband,
then Lenin and then for Sergo Ordzhonikidze, another energetic and passionate
Georgian dynamo now responsible for Heavy Industry. Then she moved to the
International Agrarian Institute in the Department of Agitation and Propaganda
where, lost in the archives, we find the daily work of Stalin’s wife in all its
Bolshevik dreariness: her boss asks his ordinary assistant, who signs herself
“N. Alliluyeva,” to arrange the publication of a shockingly tedious article
entitled “We Must Study the Youth Movement in the Village.”
“I have absolutely nothing to do with anyone in
Moscow,” she grumbled. “It’s strange, though I feel closer to non-Party
people—women of course. The reason is they’re more easygoing . . . There are a
terrible lot of new prejudices. If you don’t work, you’re just a baba!”[17] She was right. The
new Bolshevik women such as Polina Molotova were politicians in their own
right. These feminists scorned housewives and typists like Nadya. But Stalin
did not want such a wife for himself: his Nadya would be what he called a
“baba.” 16 In 1929, Nadya decided to become a powerful
Party woman in her own right and did not go on holiday with her husband but
remained in Moscow for her examinations to enter the Industrial Academy to
study synthetic fibres, hence her loving correspondence with Stalin. Education
was one of the great Bolshevik achievements and there were millions like her.
Stalin really wanted a bababut he supported her enterprise:
ironically, his instincts may have been right, because it became clear that she
was really not strong enough to be a student, mother and Stalin’s wife
simultaneously. He often signed off: “How are the exams? Kiss my Tatka!”
Molotov’s wife became a People’s Commissar—and there was every reason for Nadya
to hope she would do the same.[18]
Across the Kremlin, the magnates and their wives
converged on Voroshilov’s apartment, oblivious of the tragedy about to befall
Stalin and Nadya. None of them had far to come. Ever since Lenin had moved the
capital to Moscow in 1918, the leaders had lived in this isolated secret world,
behind walls thirteen feet thick, crenellated burgundy battlements and towering
fortified gates, which, more than anything, resembled a 64-acre theme park of
the history of old Muscovy. “Here Ivan the Terrible used to walk,” Stalin told
visitors. He daily passed the Archangel Cathedral where Ivan the Terrible lay
buried, the Ivan the Great Tower, and the Yellow Palace, where he worked, had
been built for Catherine the Great: by 1932, Stalin had lived fourteen years in
the Kremlin, as long as he had in his parental home.
These potentates—the “responsible workers” in
Bolshevik terminology—and their staff, the “service workers,” lived in
high-ceilinged, roomy apartments once occupied by Tsarist governors and
major-domos, mainly in the Poteshny[19] or Horse Guards,
existing so closely in these spired and domed courtyards that they resembled
dons living in an Oxford college: Stalin was always popping in to their homes
and the other leaders regularly turned up at his place for a chat, almost to
borrow the proverbial cup of sugar.
Most of the guests only needed to walk along the
corridor to get to the second-floor apartment of Kliment Voroshilov and his
wife Ekaterina in the Horse Guards (nominally the Red Guards Building, but no
one called it that). Their home was reached through a door in the archway that
contained the little cinema where Stalin and his friends often decamped after
dinner. Inside, it was cosy but spacious, with dark wood-panelled rooms looking
out over the Kremlin walls into the city. Voroshilov, their host, aged
fifty-two, was the most popular hero in the Bolshevik pantheon— a genial and
swaggering cavalryman, once a lathe turner, with an elegant, almost
d’Artagnanish moustache, fair hair and a cherubic rosy-cheeked face. Stalin
would have arrived with the priggish Molotov and the debauched Kuibyshev.
Molotov’s wife, the dark and formidable Polina, always finely dressed, came
from her own flat in the same building. Nadya crossed the lane from the
Poteshny with her sister Anna.
In 1932, there would have been no shortage of food and
drink, but these were the days before Stalin’s dinners became imperial
banquets. The food—Russian hors d’oeuvres, soup, various dishes of salted fish
and maybe some lamb—was cooked in the Kremlin canteen and brought hot up to the
flat, where it was served by a housekeeper and washed down with vodka and
Georgian wine in a parade of toasts. Faced with unparalleled disaster in the
regions where ten million people were starving, conspiracy in his Party,
uncertain of the loyalty of his own entourage—and with the added strain of a
troubled wife, Stalin felt beleaguered and at war. Like the others at the
centre of this whirlwind, he needed to drink and unwind. Stalin sat in the
middle of the table, never at the head, and Nadya sat opposite him.
During the week, the Stalin household was based in the
Kremlin apartment. The Stalins had two children, Vasily, eleven, a diminutive,
stubborn and nervous boy, and Svetlana, seven, a freckly red-haired girl. Then
there was Yakov, now twenty-five, son of Stalin’s first marriage, who had
joined his father in 1921, having been brought up in Georgia, a shy, dark boy
with handsome eyes. Stalin found Yakov irritatingly slow. When he was eighteen,
he had fallen in love with, and married, Zoya, a priest’s daughter. Stalin did
not approve, because he wanted Yasha to study. In a “cry for help,” Yasha shot
himself but only grazed his chest. Stalin regarded this “as blackmail.” The
stern Nadya disapproved of Yasha’s self-indulgence: “she was so appalled by
Yasha,” Stalin mused. But he was even less sympathetic.
“Couldn’t even shoot straight,” he quipped cruelly.
“This was his military humour,” explains Svetlana. Yasha later divorced Zoya,
and came home.[20]
Stalin had high and, given his own meteoric success,
unfair expectations of the sons—but he adored his daughter. In addition to
these three, there was Artyom Sergeev, Stalin’s beloved adopted son, who was
often in their house, even though his mother was still alive.[21] Stalin was more
indulgent than Nadya, even though he smacked Vasily “a couple of times.”
Indeed, this woman portrayed as angelic in every history was, in her way, even
more self-centred than Stalin. Her own family regarded her as “utterly
self-indulgent,” recalls her nephew Vladimir Redens. “The nanny complained that
Nadya was not remotely interested in the children.” Her daughter Svetlana
agreed that she was much more committed to her studies. She treated the
children sternly and never gave Svetlana a “word of praise.” It is surprising
that she rowed most with Stalin not about his evil policies but about his
spoiling the children!
Yet it is harsh to blame her for this. Her medical
report, preserved by Stalin in his archive, and the testimonies of those who
knew her, confirm that Nadya suffered from a serious mental illness, perhaps
hereditary manic depression or borderline personality disorder though her
daughter called it “schizophrenia,” and a disease of the skull that gave her
migraines. She needed special rest cures in 1922 and 1923 as she experienced
“drowsiness and weakness.” She had had an abortion in 1926 which, her daughter
revealed, had caused “female problems.” Afterwards she had no periods for
months on end. In 1927, doctors discovered her heart had a defective valve—and
she suffered from exhaustion, angina and arthritis. In 1930, the angina struck
again. Her tonsils had recently been taken out. The trip to Carlsbad did not
cure her mysterious headaches.
She did not lack for medical care—the Bolsheviks were
as obsessively hypochondriacal as they were fanatically political. Nadya was
treated by the best doctors in Russia and Germany. But these were not
psychiatrists: it is hard to imagine a worse environment for a fragile girl
than the cruel aridity of this Kremlin pressure cooker pervaded by the martial
Bolshevism that she so worshipped—and the angry thoughtlessness of Stalin, whom
she so revered.
She was married to a demanding egotist incapable of
giving her, or probably anyone, happiness: his relentless energy seemed to suck
her dry. But she was also patently the wrong person for him. She did not soothe
his stress—she added to it. He admitted he was baffled by Nadya’s mental
crises. He simply did not possess the emotional resources to help her.
Sometimes her “schizophrenia” was so grievous, “she was almost deranged.” The
magnates, and the Alliluyevs themselves, sympathized with Stalin. Yet, despite
their turbulent marriage and their strange similarity of passion and jealousy,
they loved each other after their own fashion.
After all, it was Stalin for whom Nadya was dressing
up. The “black dress with rose pattern appliqué . . .” had been bought as a
present for her by her brother, slim brown-eyed Pavel Alliluyev who had just
returned with his usual treasure chest of gifts from Berlin, where he worked
for the Red Army. With Nadya’s proud Gypsy, Georgian, Russian and German blood,
the rose looked striking against her jet-black hair. Stalin would be surprised
because, as her nephew put it, he “never encouraged her to dress more
glamorously.”[22]
The drinking at dinner was heavy, regulated by a tamada (Georgian
toastmaster). This was probably one of the Georgians such as the flamboyant
Grigory Ordzhonikidze, always known as “Sergo,” who resembled “a Georgian
prince” with his mane of long hair and leonine face. Some time during the
evening, without any of the other revellers noticing, Stalin and Nadya became
angry with one another. This was hardly a rare occurrence. Her evening began to
crumble when, among all the toasts, dancing and flirting at table, Stalin
barely noticed how she had dressed up, even though she was one of the youngest
women present. This was certainly ill-mannered but not uncommon in many
marriages.
They were surrounded by the other Bolshevik magnates,
all hardened by years in the underground, blood-spattered by their exploits in
the Civil War, and now exultant if battered by the industrial triumphs and
rural struggles of the Stalin Revolution. Some, like Stalin, were in their
fifties. But most were strapping, energetic fanatics in their late thirties,
some of the most dynamic administrators the world has ever seen, capable of
building towns and factories against all odds, but also of slaughtering their
enemies and waging war on their own peasants. In their tunics and boots, they
were macho, hard-drinking, powerful and famous across the Imperium, stars with
blazing egos, colossal responsibilities, and Mausers in their holsters. The boisterous,
booming and handsome Jewish cobbler, Lazar Kaganovich, Stalin’s deputy, had
just returned from presiding over mass executions and deportations in the North
Caucasus. Then there was the swaggering Cossack commander Budyonny with his
luxuriant walrus moustaches and dazzling white teeth, and the slim, shrewd and
dapper Armenian Mikoyan, all veterans of brutal expeditions to raise grain and
crush the peasants. These were voluble, violent and colourful political
showmen.
They were an incestuous family, a web of long
friendships and enduring hatreds, shared love affairs, Siberian exiles and
Civil War exploits: Mikhail Kalinin, the President, had been visiting the
Alliluyevs since 1900. Nadya knew Voroshilov’s wife from Tsaritsyn (later
Stalingrad) and she studied at the Industrial Academy with Maria Kaganovich and
Dora Khazan (wife of another magnate, Andreyev, also present), her best friends
along with Polina Molotova. Finally there was the small intellectual Nikolai
Bukharin, all twinkling eyes and reddish beard, a painter, poet and philosopher
whom Lenin had once called the “darling of the Party” and who had been Stalin
and Nadya’s closest friend. He was a charmer, the Puck of the Bolsheviks.
Stalin had defeated him in 1929 but he remained friends with Nadya. Stalin
himself half loved and half hated “Bukharchik” in that deadly combination of
admiration and envy that was habitual to him. That night, Bukharin was
readmitted, at least temporarily, to the magic circle[23].
Irritated by Stalin’s lack of attention, Nadya started
dancing with her louche, sandy-haired Georgian godfather, “Uncle Abel”
Yenukidze, the official in charge of the Kremlin who was already shocking the
Party with his affairs with teenage ballerinas. “Uncle Abel’s” fate would
illustrate the deadly snares of hedonism when private life belonged to the
Party. Perhaps Nadya was trying to make Stalin angry. Natalya Rykova, who was
in the Kremlin that night with her father, the former Premier, but not at the
dinner, heard the next day that Nadya’s dancing infuriated Stalin. The story is
certainly credible because other accounts mention her flirting with someone.
Perhaps Stalin was so drunk, he did not even notice.
Stalin was busy with his own flirtation. Even though
Nadya was opposite him, he flirted shamelessly with the “beautiful” wife of
Alexander Yegorov, a Red Army commander with whom he had served in the Polish
War of 1920. Galina Yegorova, née Zekrovskaya, thirty-four, was a brash film
actress, a “pretty, interesting and charming” brunette well known for her
affairs and risqué dresses. Among those drab Bolshevik matrons, Yegorova must
have been like a peacock in a farmyard for, as she herself admitted in her
later interrogation, she moved in a world of “dazzling company, stylish clothes
. . . flirtatiousness, dancing and fun.” Stalin’s style of flirting alternated
between traditional Georgian chivalry and, when drunk, puerile boorishness. On
this occasion, the latter triumphed. Stalin always entertained children by
throwing biscuits, orange peel and bits of bread into plates of ice cream or
cups of tea. He flirted with the actress in the same way, lobbing breadballs at
her. His courtship of Yegorova made Nadya manically jealous: she could not
tolerate it.
Stalin was no womanizer: he was married to Bolshevism
and emotionally committed to his own drama in the cause of Revolution. Any
private emotions were bagatelles compared to the betterment of mankind through
Marxism-Leninism. But even if they were low on his list of priorities, even if
he was emotionally damaged, he was not uninterested in women—and women were
definitely interested in him, even “enamoured,” according to Molotov. One of
his entourage later said that Stalin complained that the Alliluyev women “would
not leave him alone” because “they all wanted to go to bed with him.” There was
some truth in this.
Whether they were the wives of comrades, relations or
servants, women buzzed around him like amorous bees. His newly opened archives
reveal how he was bombarded with fan letters not unlike those received by
modern pop stars. “Dear Comrade Stalin . . . I saw you in my dreams . . . I
have hopes of an audience . . .” writes a provincial teacher, adding hopefully
like a starry-eyed groupie: “I enclose my photograph . . .”
Stalin replied playfully if negatively: “Comrade
Unfamiliar! I ask you to trust that I have no wish to disappoint you and I’m
ready to respect your letter but I have to say I have no appointment (no time!)
to satisfy your wish. I wish you all the best. J Stalin. PS Your letter and
photograph returned.” But sometimes he must have told Poskrebyshev that he
would be happy to meet his admirers. This gels with the story of Ekaterina
Mikulina, an attractive, ambitious girl of twenty-three who wrote a treatise,
“Socialist Competition of Working People,” which she sent to Stalin, admitting
it was full of mistakes and asking for his help. He invited her to visit him on
10 May 1929. He liked her and it was said she stayed the night at the dacha in
Nadya’s absence.[24] She
received no benefits from this short liaison other than the honour of his
writing her preface.
Certainly Nadya, who knew him best, suspected him of
having affairs and she had every reason to know. His bodyguard Vlasik confirmed
to his daughter that Stalin was so besieged with offers that he could not
resist everyone: “he was a man after all,” behaving with the seigneurial
sensuality of a traditional Georgian husband. Nadya’s jealousy was sometimes
manic, sometimes indulgent: in her letters, she lovingly teased him about his
female admirers as if she was proud of being married to such a great man. But
at the theatre, she had recently ruined the evening by throwing a tantrum when
he flirted with a ballerina. Most recently, there was the female hairdresser in
the Kremlin with whom Stalin was evidently conducting some sort of dalliance.
If he had merely visited the barber’s shop like the other leaders, this
anonymous girl would not have become such an issue. Yet Molotov remembered the
hairdresser fifty years later.
Stalin had had his share of affairs within the Party.
His relationships were as short as his spells in exile. Most of the girlfriends
were fellow revolutionaries or their wives. Molotov was impressed by Stalin’s
“success” with women: when, just before the Revolution, Stalin stole a
girlfriend named Marusya from Molotov, the latter put it down to his “beautiful
dark brown eyes,” though luring a girlfriend away from this plodder hardly
qualifies Stalin as a Casanova. Kaganovich confirmed that Stalin enjoyed
affairs with several comrades including the “plump, pretty” Ludmilla Stal.[25] One source mentions an earlier
affair with Nadya’s friend Dora Khazan. Stalin may have benefited from
revolutionary sexual freedom, even, in his diffident way, enjoying some success
with the girls who worked on the Central Committee secretariat, but he remained
a traditional Caucasian. He favoured liaisons with discreet GPU staff: the
hairdresser fitted the bill.
As so often with jealousy, Nadya’s manic tantrums and
bouts of depression encouraged the very thing she dreaded. All of these things—
her illness, disappointment about her dress, politics, jealousy and Stalin’s
oafishness—came together that night.[26]
Stalin was unbearably rude to Nadya but historians, in
their determination to show his monstrosity, have ignored how unbearably rude
she was to him. This “peppery woman,” as Stalin’s security chief, Pauker,
described her, frequently shouted at Stalin in public, which was why her own
mother thought her a “fool.” The cavalryman Budyonny, who was at the dinner,
remembered how she was “always nagging and humiliating” Stalin. “I don’t know
how he puts up with it,” Budyonny confided in his wife. By now her depression
had become so bad that she confided in a friend that she was sick of
“everything, even the children.”
The lack of interest of a mother in her own children
is a flashing danger signal if ever there was one, but there was no one to act
on it. Stalin was not the only one puzzled by her. Few of this rough-hewn
circle, including Party women like Polina Molotova, understood that Nadya was
probably suffering from clinical depression: “she couldn’t control herself,”
said Molotov. She desperately needed sympathy. Polina Molotova admitted
the Vozhd was “rough” with Nadya. Their roller coaster
continued. One moment she was leaving Stalin, the next they loved each other
again.
At the
dinner, some accounts claim, it was a political toast that inflamed her. Stalin
toasted the destruction of the Enemies of the State and noticed Nadya had not
raised her glass.
“Why
aren’t you drinking?” he called over truculently, aware that she and Bukharin
shared a disapproval of his starvation of the peasantry. She ignored him. To
get her attention, Stalin tossed orange peel and flicked cigarettes at her, but
this outraged her. When she became angrier and angrier, he called over, “Hey
you! Have a drink!”
“My name
isn’t ‘hey’!” she retorted. Furiously rising from the table, she stormed out.
It was probably now that Budyonny heard her shout at Stalin: “Shut up! Shut
up!”
Stalin shook
his head in the ensuing silence: “What a fool!” he muttered, boozily not
understanding how upset she was. Budyonny must have been one of the many there
who sympathized with Stalin.
“I
wouldn’t let my wife talk to me like that!” declared the Cossack bravo who may
not have been the best adviser since his own first wife had committed suicide
or at least died accidentally while playing with his pistol.[27]
Someone
had to follow her out. She was the leader’s wife so the deputy leader’s wife
had to look after her. Polina Molotova pulled on her coat and followed Nadya
outside. They walked round and round the Kremlin, as others were to do in times
of crisis.
Nadya
complained to Polina, “He grumbles all the time . . . and why did he have to
flirt like that?” She talked about the “business with the hairdresser” and
Yegorova at the dinner. The women decided, as women do, that he was drunk,
playing the fool. But Polina, devoted to the Party, also criticized her friend,
saying “it was wrong of her to abandon Stalin at such a difficult time.”
Perhaps Polina’s “ Partiinost”—Party-mindedness—made Nadya feel
even more isolated.
“She
quietened down,” recalled Polina, “and talked about the Academy and her chances
of starting work . . . When she seemed perfectly calm,” in the early hours,
they said goodnight. She left Nadya at the Poteshny Palace and crossed the
lane, home to the Horse Guards.[28]
Nadya
went to her room, dropping the tea rose from her hair at the door. The dining
room, with a special table for Stalin’s array of government telephones, was the
main room there. Two halls led off it. To the right was Stalin’s office and
small bedroom where he slept either on a military cot or a divan, the habits of
an itinerant revolutionary. Stalin’s late hours and Nadya’s strict attendance
at the Academy meant they had separate rooms. Carolina Til, the housekeeper,
the nannies and the servants were further down this corridor. The left corridor
led to Nadya’s tiny bedroom where the bed was draped in her favourite shawls.
The windows opened onto the fragrant roses of the Alexandrovsky Gardens.
Stalin’s
movements in the next two hours are a mystery: did he return home? The party
continued chez Voroshilov. But the bodyguard Vlasik told
Khrushchev (who was not at the dinner) that Stalin left for a rendezvous at his
Zubalovo dacha with a woman named Guseva, the wife of an officer, described by
Mikoyan, who appreciated feminine aesthetics, as “very beautiful.” Some of
these country houses were just fifteen minutes’ drive from the Kremlin. If he
did go, it is possible he took some boon companions with him when the women
went to bed. Voroshilov’s wife was famously jealous of her husband. Molotov and
President Kalinin, an old roué, were mentioned afterwards to Bukharin by Stalin
himself. Certainly Vlasik would have gone with Stalin in the car. When Stalin
did not come home, Nadya is said to have called the dacha.
“Is
Stalin there?”
“Yes,”
replied an “inexperienced fool” of a security guard.
“Who’s
with him?”
“Gusev’s
wife.”
This
version may explain Nadya’s sudden desperation. However, a resurgence of her
migraine, a wave of depression or just the sepulchral solitude of Stalin’s grim
apartment in the early hours are also feasible. There are holes in the story
too: Molotov, the nanny, and Stalin’s granddaughter, among others, insisted
that Stalin slept at home in the apartment. Stalin certainly would not have
entertained women in his Zubalovo dacha, because we know his children were
there. But there were plenty of other dachas. More importantly, no one has
managed to identify this Guseva, though there were several army officers of
that name. Moreover Mikoyan never mentioned this to his children or in his own
memoirs. Prim Molotov may have been protecting Stalin in his conversations in
old age—he lied about many other matters, as did Khrushchev, dictating his
reminiscences in his dotage. It seems more likely that if this woman was the
“beautiful” wife of a soldier, it was Yegorova who was actually at the party
and whose flirting caused the row in the first place.
We will
never know the truth but there is no contradiction between these accounts:
Stalin probably did go drinking at a dacha with some fellow carousers, maybe
Yegorova, and he certainly returned to the apartment in the early hours. The
fates of these magnates and their women would soon depend on their relationship
with Stalin. Many of them would die terrible deaths within five years. Stalin
never forgot the part they each played that November night.
Nadya
looked at one of the many presents that her genial brother Pavel had brought
back from Berlin along with the black embroidered dress she was still wearing.
This was a present she had requested because, as she told her brother,
“sometimes it’s so scary and lonely in the Kremlin with just one soldier on
duty.” It was an exquisite lady’s pistol in an elegant leather holster. This is
always described as a Walther but in fact it was a Mauser. It is little known
that Pavel also brought an identical pistol as a present for Polina Molotova
but pistols were not hard to come by in that circle.
Whenever
Stalin came home, he did not check his wife but simply went to bed in his own
bedroom on the other side of the apartment.
Some say
Nadya bolted the bedroom door. She began to write a letter to Stalin, “a
terrible letter,” thought her daughter Svetlana. In the small hours, somewhere
between 2 and 3 a.m. when she had finished it, she lay on the bed.
The
household rose as normal. Stalin always lay in until about eleven. No one knew
when he had come home and whether he had encountered Nadya. It was late when
Carolina Til tried Nadya’s door and perhaps forced it open. “Shaking with
fright,” she found her mistress’s body on the floor by the bed in a pool of
blood. The pistol was beside her. She was already cold. The housekeeper rushed
to get the nanny. They returned and laid the body on the bed before debating
what to do. Why did they not waken Stalin? “Little people” have a very
reasonable aversion to breaking bad news to their Tsars. “Faint with fear,”
they telephoned the security boss, Pauker, then “Uncle Abel” Yenukidze, Nadya’s
last dancing partner, the politician in charge of the Kremlin, and Polina
Molotova, the last person to see her alive. Yenukidze, who lived in Horse
Guards like the others, arrived first—he alone of the leaders viewed the
pristine scene, knowledge for which he would pay dearly. Molotov and Voroshilov
arrived minutes later.
One can
only imagine the frantic uproar in the apartment as the oblivious ruler of
Russia slept off his drink down one corridor while his wife slept eternally
down the other. They also called Nadya’s family—her brother Pavel, who lived
across the river in the new House on the Embankment, and parents, Sergei and
Olga Alliluyev. Someone called the family’s personal doctor who in turn
summoned the well-known Professor Kushner.
Peering
at her later, this disparate group of magnates, family and servants, searching
for reasons for this act of despair and betrayal, found the angry letter she
left behind. No one knows what it contained—or whether it was destroyed by
Stalin or someone else. But Stalin’s bodyguard, Vlasik, later revealed that
something else was found in her bedroom: a copy of the damaging anti-Stalinist
“Platform,” written by Riutin, an Old Bolshevik who was now under arrest. This
might be significant or it might mean nothing. All the leaders then read
opposition and émigré journals so perhaps Nadya was reading Stalin’s copy. In
her letters to Stalin, she reported what she had read in the White press “about
YOU! Are you interested?” Nonetheless, during those days in the country at
large, the mere possession of this document warranted arrest.
No one
knew what to do. They gathered in the dining room, whispering: should they wake
up Stalin? Who would tell the Vozhd ? How had she died?
Suddenly Stalin himself walked into the room. Someone, most likely it was
Yenukidze, Stalin’s old friend who, judging by the archives, had assumed
responsibility, stepped forward and said: “Joseph, Nadezhda Sergeevna is no
longer with us. Joseph, Joseph, Nadya’s dead.” [29]
Stalin
was poleaxed. This supremely political creature, with an inhuman disregard for
the millions of starving women and children in his own country, displayed more
humanity in the next few days than he would at any other time in his life.
Olga, Nadya’s mother, an elegant lady of independent spirit who had known
Stalin so long and always regretted her daughter’s behaviour, hurried into the
dining room where a broken Stalin was still absorbing the news. Doctors had
arrived and they offered the heartbroken mother some valerian drops, the valium
of the thirties, but she could not drink them. Stalin staggered towards her:
“I’ll drink them,” he said. He downed the whole dose. He saw the body and the
letter which, wrote Svetlana, shocked and wounded him grievously.
Nadya’s
brother, Pavel, arrived with his dimpled sunny wife Yevgenia, known to all as
Zhenya, who would herself play a secret role in Stalin’s life—and suffer for
it. They were alarmed not only by the death of a sister but by the sight of
Stalin himself.
“She’s
crippled me,” he said. They had never seen him so soft, so vulnerable. He wept,
saying something like this lament of many years later: “Oh Nadya, Nadya . . .
how we needed you, me and the children!” The rumours of murder started
immediately. Had Stalin returned to the apartment and shot her in a row? Or had
he insulted her again and gone to bed, leaving her to kill herself ? But the
tragedy raised greater questions too: until that night, the existence of the
magnates was a “wonderful life,” as described by Ekaterina Voroshilova in her
diary. That night, it ended forever. “How,” she asks, “did our life in the
Party become so complex, that it was incomprehensible to the point of agony?”
The “agony” was just beginning. The suicide “altered history,” claims the
Stalins’ nephew, Leonid Redens. “It made the Terror inevitable.” Naturally
Nadya’s family exaggerate the significance of her death: Stalin’s vindictive,
paranoid and damaged character was already formed long before. The Terror
itself was the result of vast political, economic and diplomatic forces—but
Stalin’s personality certainly shaped it. Nadya’s death created one of the rare
moments of doubt in a life of iron self-belief and dogmatic certainty. How did
Stalin recover and what was the effect of this humiliation on him, his
entourage—and Russia itself? Did vengeance for this personal fiasco play its
part in the coming Terror when some of the guests that night would liquidate
the others?
Stalin
suddenly picked up Nadya’s pistol and weighed it in his hands: “It was a toy,”
he told Molotov, adding strangely, “It was only fired once a year!”
The man
of steel “was in a shambles, knocked sideways,” exploding in “sporadic fits of
rage,” blaming anyone else, even the books she was reading, before subsiding
into despair. Then he declared that he resigned from power. He too was going to
kill himself: “I can’t go on living like this . . .”[30]
[1] The Soviet secret
police was first called the Extraordinary Commission for Combating
Counterrevolution and Sabotage, known as the Cheka. In 1922, it became the
State Political Administration (GPU) then the United GPU: OGPU. In 1934, it was
subsumed into the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD). However,
secret policemen were still known as “Chekists” and the secret police itself as
“the Organs.” In 1941 and 1943, State Security was separated into its own
Commissariat, the NKGB. In 1954, it became a Committee of State Security, the
KGB.
[2] This account of 8
November 1932 is based on the memoirs of Molotov and Svetlana Alliluyeva,
interviews with the surviving members of the Stalin family and children of the
Soviet leaders along with Nadezhda’s health records, letters to and from
Stalin, and official reports in the RGASPI and GARF archives, and also
published accounts such as Edvard Radzinsky’s Stalin. Nadezhda’s looks:
Svetlana Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters to a Friend, pp. 90–111. Boris Bazhanov, Bazhanov
and the Damnation of Stalin, p. 110. Testimony of Nadezhda Stalin quoted in
Radzinsky, Stalin, pp. 278–9. Women: F. Chuev (ed.), Molotov Remembers (henceforth MR),
pp. 164, 174. Stalin’s diary 8 Nov. Postyshev was also in the meeting,
Istorichesky Arkhiv (henceforth IA) 1994 no. 1 to 1997 no. 1 and Index. 1998
no. 4, Posetiteli Kremlevskogo Kabineta IV Stalina 1924–1953. Yagoda: A. L.
Litvin et al. (eds.), Genrikh Yagoda Narkom vnytrennikh del SSSR,
Generalnyi kommissar gosudarstvennoy bezopastnosti(henceforth Yagoda),
pp. 1–20. Yagoda’s Hitlerian moustache: interview Martha Peshkova. Stalin’s
looks: honey eyes, interview Maya Kavtaradze. Arm not so bad, old greatcoat:
interview Artyom Sergeev. Smell of tobacco; interviews Leonid Redens with
author and Svetlana Alliluyeva with Rosamund Richardson (henceforth Svetlana
RR). Actors copy gait: Galina Vishnevskaya, Galina: A Russian Story, pp. 95–7.
Layout of Kremlin and homes of leaders: interview Stepan Mikoyan. Wonderful
time: RGASPI 74.1.429.65–6, diary of E. D. Voroshilova, 21 June 1954.
[3] Security: RGASPI
17.162.9.54, quoted in Oleg Khlevniuk, Le Circle du Kremlin, Staline et
le bureau politique dans les années 30. Les jeux du pouvoir, p.
51. On Lenin: Robert Service, Lenin, pp. 400–1. Visits to Bedny:
see Pavel Sudoplatov, Special Tasks, p. 52. Beggar: MR, pp. 14, 213. N.S.
Vlasik, “Moya Biografiya,” Shpion, vol. 8–9, pp. 25–7: until 1927, Stalin had
one bodyguard, Yusis, a Lithuanian who was then joined by Vlasik. Hitchhikers:
interviews Yury A. Zhdanov, Artyom Sergeev. Sudoplatov, p. 52. Decree on
Stalin’s walking: RGASPI 17.162.9.54, quoted in Khlevniuk, Circle,
p. 51. F. Chuev (ed.), Tak govoril Kaganovich (henceforth Kaganovich),
p. 191. See also MR for the story of how Stalin and Molotov
met a tramp walking through Moscow. Kremlin children running into Stalin:
interview Natalya Andreyeva.
[4] For the psoriasis
theory, which is unproven, see W. H. Bos, and E. M. Farber, “Joseph Stalin’s
Psoriasis: Its Treatment and the Consequences” in Cutis, vol. 59,
April 1997. Thanks to R. Service for bringing this to my attention. For
tonsillitis and sore throats: I. Valedinsky, “Vospominaniya o vstrechah s tov.
Stalinym IV” in Muzei Revolutzii, vol. 23, Moscow, 1992, pp. 121–6. Stalin
reprimands Vasily: Artyom Sergeev. Also: see Akaki Mgeladze, Stalin
kakim ya ego znal, pp. 198–9: “If I had done that, I wouldn’t have been
Stalin.” “Five or six Stalins”: Kaganovich, p. 154. Litsedei: see V. Zubok and
C. Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War: From Stalin to Khrushchev(henceforth
Zubok), p. 21. The early formation of Stalin’s character: “Joseph Stalin, the
Making of a Stalinist” by Robert Service in J. Channon (ed.), Politics,
Society and Stalinism in the USSR, pp. 15–30.
[5] RGASPI
558.11.1550.34–5, Stalin to Nadya 21 June 1930. Nadya the snitch: RGASPI
85.28.63.13, Nadya Alliluyeva to Ordzhonikidze, complaining of neglect of
Stalin’s call for correct training of technicians at Prodaka demiya, 2 April
1931. Thanks to Robert Service for this information.
[6] RGASPI 558.11.1550,
Nadya to Stalin 28 Aug. 1929.
[7] On Nadya’s
madness: MR, pp. 173–4. The mental problems of the Alliluyev
family: interviews Kira Alliluyeva and Stanislas Redens. Svetlana RR. Polina
quoted in Svetlana, Twenty Letters, p. 118.
[8] RGASPI 558.11.1550.27,
Nadya to Stalin 27 Sept. 1929.
[9] RGASPI 558.11.1550.8,
Stalin to Nadya 29 Aug. 1929. On Vasily’s studies and teacher: RGASPI
558.11.1550.31–2, Stalin to Nadya 2 July 1930. 558.11.1550.61–63, Svetlana to
Stalin 21 Sept. 1931.
[10] RGASPI 558.11.1550.7,
Nadya to Stalin 28 Aug. 1929. RGASPI 558.11.1550.8, Stalin to Nadya 29 Aug.
1929. Stalin on Nadya’s doctors: RGASPI 558.11.1550.30, Stalin to Nadya 21 June
1930. Stalin’s teeth: RGASPI 558.11.1550.43–5, Stalin to Nadya 24 Sept. 1930
and RGASPI 558.11.1550.34–5, Nadya to Stalin 5 Sept. 1930.
[11] RGASPI 558.11.1550.29,
Nadya to Stalin 1 Oct. 1929.
[13] RGASPI 558.11.1550.7,
Nadya to Stalin 28 Aug. 1929.
[14] Nadya to Stalin on
politics: for example, RGASPI 558.11.1550.10–12, Nadya to Stalin 2 Sept. 1929.
She reports how Ordzhonikidze and Rudzutak had met with Voroshilov; and
Ordzhonikidze’s view on the economy of Little Kabardia.
[15] Nadya, Stalin and
books. On White literature on Stalin: RGASPI 558.11.1550.65–6, Nadya to Stalin
26 Sept. 1931. RGASPI 558.11.1550.35–6, Stalin to Nadya and Nadya to Stalin 5
and 8 Sept. 1930. RGASPI 558.11.786.123–4, Nadya to A. N. Poskrebyshev 10 July
1932.
[16] Photographs: RGASPI
558.11.1550.43–5, Stalin to Nadya 24 Sept. 1930. How funny Molotov looks:
RGASPI 558.11.21550.65–6, Nadya to Stalin 29 Sept. 1931.
[17] She certainly cared
for Stalin like a good baba: “Stalin has to have a chicken diet,”
she wrote to President Kalinin in 1921. “We’ve only been allocated 15 chickens
. . . Please raise the quota since it’s only halfway through the month and
we’ve only got 5 left . . .”
[18] RGASPI 535.1.53.18, N.
Alliluyeva, IKKI, 12 May 1927. On babas: RGASPI 44.1.1.417, Nadya Alliluyeva to
Maria Svanidze 11 Jan. 1926. On chickens: RGASPI 78.1.46.
[19] The Poteshny Palace,
where the Stalins lived, means “Amusement Palace” since it once housed actors
and a theatre maintained by the Tsars.
[20] RGASPI 558.11.1550.9,
Stalin to Nadya 1 Sept. 1929.
[21] One of the few
attractive traditions of Bolshevism was the adoption of the children of fallen
heroes and ordinary orphans. Stalin adopted Artyom when the child’s father, a
famous revolutionary, was killed in 1921 and his mother was ill. Similarly,
Mikoyan adopted the sons of Sergei Shaumian, the hero of Baku; Voroshilov
adopted the son of Mikhail Frunze, the War Commissar who died suspiciously in
1925. Later, both Kaganovich and Yezhov, harsh men indeed, adopted orphans.
[22] Gulia
Djugashvili, Ded, Otets, Mat i Drugie, pp. 18–19. Kirov brought
Yakov to Moscow in 1921 and looked after him in Petersburg. RGASPI
558.11.1550.10–12, Nadya to Stalin 2 Sept. 1929. On Yasha’s and Nadya’s
suicides: RGASPI 558.11.1.213–95, Maria Svanidze diary, 9 May 1935. On Stalin’s
joke about Yasha’s suicide: Svetlana Alliluyeva RR. Life in
Kremlin, memories of Voroshilov and apartment: Artyom Sergeev. Natalya
Andreyeva. Stepan Mikoyan. MR, p. 210. Here Ivan walked: Zubok, p.
16.
[23] On Stalin and
Nadezhda’s marriage: interview Kira Alliluyeva. A “peppery woman”: Pauker
quoted by Alexander Orlov, Secret History of Stalin’s Crimes, p. 315.
Instability of Nadya: Eteri Ordzhonikidze. “Depression—a form of incipient
schizophrenia that plagued” her mother’s family—Svetlana RR. On her self-indulgence,
her illness, “even nanny complained she was not interested in the
children”—Vladimir Alliluyev (Redens). On her rudeness to Stalin: “Shut up”:
interview Nina S. Budyonny; and Maria Budyonny (third wife) in Vasilieva, Kremlin
Wives, p. 72. On “someone paying her attention”: Nadezhda Stalin in
Radzinsky, p. 278. On Yenukidze: Natalya Rykova. On the political toast: Rybin,
Oktyabre 1941, p. 10. On their rows: beating on the bathroom door, N. S.
Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers: The Glasnost Papers (henceforth Glasnost), p.
16. Chicken out of the window and Nadezhda “a fool” according to her mother:
Svetlana OOY, p. 317. On Polina Molotova’s conversation with Nadezhda on the
night of 8–9 November: MR, p. 173, and Svetlana, Twenty
Letters , pp. 117–18.
[24] She became director of
a gramophone factory from which she was sacked many years later for taking
bribes. She lived until 1998 but never spoke about her short friendship with
Stalin.
[25] Another of his
sweethearts was a young Party activist, Tatiana Slavotinskaya. The warmth of
his love letters from exile increased in proportion to his material needs:
“Dearest darling Tatiana Alexandrovna,” he wrote in December 1913, “I received
your parcel but you really didn’t need to buy new undergarments . . . I don’t know
how to repay you, my darling sweetheart!”
[26] On presence at the
dinner: Andreyevs: Natalya Andreyeva. Mikoyans: Stepan Mikoyan. Ordzhonikidze:
Eteri Ordzhonikidze. Bukharin, Molotov, Kalinin: Stalin to Bukharin in Anna
Larina, This I Cannot Forget: The Memoirs of Niko lai Bukharin’s Widow,
pp. 142, 291. Pavel and Zhenya Alliluyev: Kira Alliluyeva. Budyonny: Nina
Budyonny. White teeth: Isaac Babel, 1920 Diary, p. 89. Story of
Nadya dancing with someone else: “Somebody was paying too much attention to her
at the party . . .” Nadezhda Stalin (granddaughter who heard the story from
Anna Alliluyeva) quoted in Radzinsky, p. 278. Dancing with Yenukidze: interview
Natalya Rykov. On Stalin and women: Stalin “quite handsome” etc.: MR,
p. 174. “Pretty” Yegorova: A. T. Rybin, Stalin v Oktyabre 1941, p.
20. On Yegorova “dancing and fun”: interrogation record quoted in full by
Larissa Vasilieva, Kremlin Wives, pp. 103–11. “Yegorov’s beautiful
wife who used to be a cinema star”: Joseph E. Davies, Mission to Moscow,
p. 95; Svetlana Alliluyeva, Only One Year (henceforth
Svetlana OOY ), pp. 131, 317; interview Nadezhda Vlasik.
Fanmail: RGASPI 558.11.726.61, Rachel Dizik to Stalin and Stalin’s reply 3
April 1931. On Mikulina: IA; E. N. Mikulina’s visit to Stalin:
Zhores Medvedev,Politicheskiy Dnevnik, 1975, pp. 364, 428–34, Stalin’s
Sochineniya, vol. 12 (1949), pp. 108–15. Story of Rusudana Zhordaniya: A. T.
Rybin, Stalin v Oktyabre 1941, p. 18. In author’s interview with A.
Mirtskhulava who knew Rusudana well, he ridiculed the idea of an affair: “She
was so much younger than him”; Interview Natalya A. Poskrebysheva. On Vlasik:
Interview with Nadezhda Vlasik. On success with Party women, Stal and
Slavotinskaya: Kaganovich, p. 160. Stalin letter to Tatiana
Slavotinskaya quoted in Miklos Kun, Stalin: An Unknown Portrait, p.
41. On Dora Khazan: Bazhanov, p. 36. On jealousy (ballerina) and
“self-indulgent”: interview with Vladimir F. Alliluyev (Redens). On jealousy
(lady barber) and madness: MR, p. 173; Natalya Rykova; Davies, p.
95. On Nadezhda’s jealous letters to Stalin: RGASPI 558.11.1550.148, 30 June
1930. Dancing: Kozlovsky in Vladimir Karpov, Rastrelyanniye Marshaly,
p. 342. Rosa Kaganovich: Kaganovich, pp. 48–50. On women in the
Great Terror: Robert Conquest, Stalin: Breaker of Nations, p. 216. On Politburo
(PB) wives 5 July 1937: AP RF 3.58.174.107, quoted in Alexander Yakovlev, A
Century of Violence in Soviet Russia, p. 42. Michael Parrish, The Lesser
Terror: Soviet State Security 1939–1953 (henceforth Lesser Terror): p. 33. All
Alliluyevs want to sleep with Stalin: Sergo Beria, Beria My Father: Inside
Stalin’s Kremlin (henceforth Sergo B), p. 150: story told to Nina Beria by
Svetlana.
[27] Nadezhda’s
looks/mentality: self-indulgence: Vladimir Redens [Alliluyev]. Svetlana, Twenty
Letters, pp. 90–111. Bazhanov, p 110. Testimony of Nadezhda Stalin quoted
in Radzinsky, pp. 278–9. MR p. 164. Artyom Sergeev. Mentally
unbalanced: Z. A. Zhdanova quoted in Svetlana, Twenty Letters, p. 112. Smacking
Vasily: Rosamond Richardson, The Long Shadow: Inside Stalin’s Family,
pp. 130–1. Nadya’s medical records: RGASPI 558.11.1551.
[28] Polina and Nadya,
Stalin in apartment: MR, p. 173, and Polina’s and nurse’s account
to Svetlana, Twenty Letters, pp. 116–8; plus family accounts to
author: Kira Alliluyeva, Artyom Sergeev, Leonid Redens, Vladimir Alliluyev
(Redens). Rose dropped: Nadezhda Stalin, granddaughter in Radzinsky, p. 278.
The gun: Nadezhda’s request to Pavel, door bolted: interview with Kira
Alliluyeva. Artyom Sergeev actually handled the pistol, interview with author.
The flat: MR, p. 189; also Artyom Sergeev. Story of Guseva and
foolish guard: Khrushchev, Glasnost, pp. 15–17. Time of death: Dr.
Kushner’s secret report: GARF 7523c.149a.2–7. Svetlana, Twenty Letters, pp.
116–8: she quotes the accounts of her nanny and Polina Molotova from 1955.
Anastas Mikoyan,Tak bylo (henceforth Mikoyan), p. 332: even though
she was much closer to the gunshot, Zina Ordzhonikidze only heard “a dull
sound” when Sergo Ordzhonikidze shot himself. On the Riutin Platform: Vlasik in
interview with Dr. N. Antipenko quoted in Radzinsky, p. 286. “Joseph, Nadya’s
no longer with us”: Svetlana, Twenty Letters, p. 117. “Josef,
Nadya’s dead”: Vasilieva, Kremlin Wives, p. 67. Yenukidze first to
arrive, called by nurse: Larina, p. 142.
[30] Yenukidze’s role: GARF
7523c-149a-2.1–6 including report of Prof. 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 had been arrested in 1935 for membership
of terrorist group. “Oh Nadya, Nadya”: Mgeladze, pp. 117–18. “Overturned my
life”: Nadya Vlasik. “She’s crippled me”: Svanidze diary. Kaganovich, pp. 73,
154. Svetlana, Twenty Letters, pp. 116–20, “I can’t go on living like this.”
Shambles: Svetlana, Richardson, Long Shadow, pp. 130–1. Stalin, “toy” pistol:
MR, p. 173.
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