STALIN: THE COURT OF THE RED TSAR

BY

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE

PART FIVE

SLAUGHTER: BERIA ARRIVES 1938–1939

 

24. Stalin’s Jewesses and the Family in Danger

Once, when Stalin was resting at Zubalovo, Pavel and Zhenya Alliluyev’s middle child Sergei kept crying and the parents worried that he would be disturbed. Pavel, who had a hysterical temper like his sister Nadya, slapped his daughter Kira for not keeping him quiet. Kira, now a teenager, was irrepressible and, having grown up around Stalin, could not understand the danger. When she refused to eat something Stalin offered her, Pavel kicked her under the table. Yet the children played around Stalin and his killers as obliviously as birds fluttering in and out of a crocodile’s open mouth.

Stalin still visited his comrades’ houses, often calling at Poskrebyshev’s for dinner where there was dancing and he played charades. Poskrebyshev had recently married a sparky girl who had joined Stalin’s circle. In 1934, this unlikely romantic hero went to a party at the house of the Kremlin doctor Mikhail Metalikov, whose wife Asya was indirectly related to Trotsky, her sister being married to his son, Sedov. Metalikov’s real name was Masenkis, a family of Jewish Lithuanian sugar barons, a dangerous combination.

Metalikov’s sister was Bronislava, dark and lithe, full of the energy and playfulness that was so often missing from Old Bolshevik women. The 24-year-old Bronka was married to a lawyer with whom she already had a daughter, while qualifying as an endocrinologist. Photographs show her slim, mischievous elegance in a polka-dot dress. That day at the party, she was playing some sort of game, running round the table from which Poskrebyshev, Stalin’s simian chef de cabinet of forty-three, watched her. When she started a food fight, she threw a cake that missed its target and landed right on Poskrebyshev’s Party tunic: he fell in love with Bronka and married her soon afterwards. Family photographs show the worshipful devotion of Poskrebyshev, who appears in history as a Quasimodo but is seen here as the loving husband resting his head on his wife’s lustrous shoulder, nuzzling her brown hair.

Beauty and the Beast caused much merriment in Stalin’s entourage: Kira Alliluyeva heard “Poskrebyshev’s beautiful Polish wife joke that he was so ugly that she only went to bed with him in the dark.” But Poskrebyshev was proud of his ugliness: Stalin chose him for his hideous countenance. He cheerfully played court jester: Stalin dared Poskrebyshev to drink a glass of vodka in one gulp without a sip of water or to see how long he could hold up his hands with burning paper under each nail.

“Look!” Stalin would laugh, “Sasha can drink a glass of vodka and not even wrinkle his nose!” Stalin liked Bronka, one of a new generation of lighthearted girls, secure in the heart of the élite, where she was accustomed to meet the magnates. She called Stalin the familiar ty and if she travelled abroad, she, like the Alliluyev women, always brought a present for Svetlana, calling Stalin to ask if she could give it. “Will it suit her?” he asked about a Western pullover.

“Oh yes!”

“Then give it to her!”

Bronka’s best friend was Yevgenia Yezhova, editor and irrepressible literary groupie. These two giggly and flighty glamour pusses of Jewish Polish or Lithuanian origins were so similar that Kira Alliluyeva thought they were sisters. They even shared the same patronymic Solomonova though they were no relation. Yezhov and Poskrebyshev were close friends too— they would go fishing together while their wives gossiped.[1]

While Blackberry, now promoted to candidate Politburo member, massacred his victims, his wife was friends with all the artistic stars and slept with many of them. The enchanting Isaac Babel was Yezhova’s chief lion: “If you invited people ‘for Babel,’ they all came,” wrote Babel’s wife, Pirozhkova. Solomon Mikhoels, the Yiddish actor who performed King Lear for Stalin, jazz-band leader Leonid Utesov, film director Eisenstein, novelist Mikhail Sholokhov and journalist Mikhail Koltsov attended the salon of this fascinating flibbertigibbet. At the Kremlin parties, Yezhova fox-trotted the most, not missing a dance. Her best friend, Zinaida Glikina, had also created a literary salon. When her marriage broke up, Yezhov invited her to live with them and seduced her. She was far from being his only mistress, while Yevgenia enthusiastically pursued literary affairs with Babel, Koltsov and Sholokhov. Few refused an invitation from Yezhov’s wife: “Just think,” Babel said, “our girl from Odessa has become the first lady of the kingdom!”[2]

After Nadya’s death, there was a rumour that Stalin fell in love with and married Lazar Kaganovich’s sister, Rosa, his niece (also named Rosa) or his daughter Maya. This was repeated and widely believed: there were even photographs showing Rosa Kaganovich as a dark pretty woman. The Kaganoviches were a good-looking family—Lazar himself was handsome as a young man and his daughter Maya grew up to be compared to Elizabeth Taylor. The significance of the story was that Stalin had a Jewish wife, useful propaganda for the Nazis who had an interest in merging the Jewish and Bolshevik devils into Mr. and Mrs. Stalin. The Kaganoviches, father and daughter, were so emphatic in their denials that they perhaps protested too much but it seems this particular story is a myth.[3]

The story is doubly ironic since the Nazis had no need to invent such a character: Stalin was surrounded by Jewesses—from Polina Molotova and Maria Svanidze to Poskrebysheva and Yezhova. Beria’s son, reliable on gossip, dubious on politics, recalled that his father gleefully listed Stalin’s affairs with Jewesses.[4]

These pretty young Jewesses fluttered around Stalin but they were all of “dubious origins.” They were more interested in clothes, jokes and affairs than dialectical materialism. Along with Zhenya Alliluyeva and Maria Svanidze, they were surely the life and soul of this fatally interwoven society of Stalin’s family and comrades. Stanislas Redens, chief of the Moscow NKVD, often took his family and the other Alliluyevs over to the Yezhovs. The children were fascinated by the NKVD boss: “Yezhov pranced down the steps in the full dress uniform of Commissar-General in a rather scary way as if he was very full of himself,” recalls Leonid Redens. “He was so sullen while my father was so open.” Kira Alliluyeva enjoyed the frothy banter of Yevgenia Yezhova and Bronka Poskrebysheva. Yezhov, who worked all night, was usually too tired to socialize so Kira and the other teenagers hid behind a curtain. When the minuscule Blackberry strode past in his boots, they started giggling. But their fathers, Pavel Alliluyev and Stanislas Redens, who understood what was at stake, were furious with them—but how could they explain how dangerous a game it was? Now, the promiscuous horseplay of the women around Stalin made them suddenly vulnerable.

In the spring, Stalin began to distance himself from the family, whose gossipy arrogance suddenly seemed suspicious. When they gathered at his apartment for Svetlana’s eleventh birthday on 28 February 1937, Yakov, Stalin’s gentle Georgian son, brought Julia, his Jewish wife, for the first time. She had been married to a Chekist bodyguard when she met Yakov through the Redens, whom Stalin immediately blamed for making a match with “that Jewish woman.” Maria Svanidze, always intriguing, called Julia “an adventuress” and tried to persuade Stalin.

“Joseph, it’s impossible. You must interfere!” This was enough to win Stalin’s sympathy for his son.

“A man loves the woman he loves!” he retorted, whether she was a “princess or a seamstress.” After they married and had their daughter Gulia, Stalin noticed how well Julia kept Yakov’s clothes. She was a baba after all. “Now I see your wife’s a good thing,” Stalin finally told Yasha who lived with his little family in the grand apartment building on Granovsky Street. When Stalin finally met Julia, he liked her, made a fuss of her and even fed her with a fork like a loving Georgian father-in-law.

Stalin, losing patience with the family, did not attend the party. Maria Svanidze thought she could understand why: the Alliluyevs were useless: “crazy Olga, idiot Fyodor, imbecilic Pavel and Niura [Anna Redens], narrow-minded Stan [Redens], lazy Vasya [Vasily Stalin], soppy Yasha [Djugashvili]. The only normal people are Alyosha, Zhenya and me and . . . Svetlana.” This was ironic since it was the Svanidzes who were the first to fall. Maria herself was ebulliently egotistical, tormenting her own husband with letters that boasted, “I’m better looking than 70% of Bolshevik wives . . . Anyone who meets me remembers forever.” This was true but far from helpful at Stalin’s court. One pities these haughty, decent women who found themselves in the quagmire of this place and time which they so little understood. [5]

That spring, Stalin and Pavel played Svanidze and Redens at billiards. The losers traditionally had to crawl under the table as their penalty. When Stalin’s side lost, Pavel diplomatically suggested that the children, Kira and Sergei, should crawl under the table for them. Sergei did not mind—he was only nine—but Kira, who was eighteen, refused defiantly. As outspoken as her mother and fearless with it, she insisted that Stalin and her father had lost and under the table they should go. Pavel became hysterical and clipped her with the billiard cue.

Soon afterwards, Stalin and the blue-eyed, dandyish Svanidze suddenly ceased to be “like brothers.” “Alyosha was quite a liberal, a European,” explained Molotov. “Stalin sensed this . . .” Svanidze was Deputy Chairman of the State Bank, an institution filled with urbane cosmopolitans now under grave suspicion. On 2 April 1937, Stalin wrote an ominous note to Yezhov: “Purge the staff of the State Bank.” Svanidze had also done secret and sensitive work for Stalin over the years. Maria Svanidze’s diary stopped in the middle of the year: her access to Stalin had suddenly ended. By 21 December, they were under investigation and not invited for Stalin’s birthday which must have been agony for Maria. Days later, the Svanidzes visited Zhenya and Pavel Alliluyev in the House on the Embankment (where they all lived). Maria showed off her low-cut velvet dress. After they left at midnight, Zhenya and Kira were doing the dishes when the bell rang. It was Maria’s son from her first marriage: “Mama and Alyosha have been arrested. She was taken away in her beautiful clothes.” A few months later, Zhenya received a letter from Maria who begged her to pass it on to Stalin: “If I don’t leave this camp, I’ll die.” She took the letter to Stalin who warned her: “Don’t ever do this again!”

Maria was moved to a harsher prison. Zhenya sensed the danger for her and her children of being so close to Stalin, although she adored him until the end of her days, despite her terrible misfortunes. She drew back from Stalin while nagging Pavel to speak to him about their arrested friends. Apparently he did so: “They’re my friends—so put me in jail too!” Some were released.

The other Alliluyevs also did their bit: grandmother Olga, living a grande dame’s life in the Kremlin, said little. While the others believed that Stalin did not know the details and was being tricked by the NKVD, she alone of this ship of fools understood: “nothing happens that he does not know about.” But her estranged husband, the respected Sergei, appealed repeatedly to Stalin, waiting for him on the sofa in his apartment. Oftentimes he fell asleep there and awoke in the early hours to find Stalin arriving from dinner. There and then he begged for someone’s life. Stalin teased his father-in-law by repeating his favourite expression: “Exactly exactly”: “So you came to see me, ‘Exactly Exactly,’ ” Stalin joked.

Just after Svanidze’s arrest, Mikoyan arrived as normal at Kuntsevo for dinner with Stalin who, knowing how close he was to Alyosha, walked straight up to him and said: “Did you hear we’ve arrested Svanidze?”

“Yes . . . but how could it happen?”

“He’s a German spy,” replied Stalin.

“How can it be?” replied Mikoyan. “There’s no evidence of his sabotage. What’s the benefit of a spy who does nothing?”

Stalin explained that Svanidze was a “special sort of spy,” recruited when he was a German prisoner during the Great War, whose job was simply to provide information. Presumably, after this revelation, dinner at Stalin’s continued as usual.[6]

Once a leader was under attack, the Terror followed its own momentum. Just demoted, Postyshev, the tough, sallow-faced and arrogant “prince” of the Ukraine, who had so entertained Stalin by slow-dancing with Molotov, frantically proved his ferocity by eliminating virtually the entire bureaucracy in the Volga town of Kuibyshev.[7] Now, at the Plenum in January 1938, he was to be destroyed for killing the wrong people.

“The Soviet and Party leaderships were in Enemy hands,” claimed Postyshev.

“All of it? From top to bottom?” interrupted Mikoyan.

“Weren’t there any honest people?” asked Bulganin.

“Aren’t you exaggerating, Comrade Postyshev?” added Molotov.

“But there were errors,” Kaganovich declared, a cue to Postyshev to say:

“I shall talk about my personal errors.”

“I want you to tell the truth,” said Beria.

“Please permit me to finish and explain the whole business to the best of my ability,” Postyshev pleaded at which Kaganovich boomed: “You’re not very good at explaining it—that’s the whole point.”

Postyshev got up to defend himself but Andreyev snapped: “Comrade Postyshev, take your seat. This is no place for strolling around.” Postyshev’s strolling days were over: Malenkov attacked him. Stalin proposed his demotion from the Politburo: Khrushchev, who was soon appointed to run the Ukraine, replaced him as candidate member, stepping into the front rank. But the attacks on Postyshev contained a warning for Yezhov whose arrests were increasingly frenzied. Meanwhile Stalin seemed undecided about Postyshev[8]: his high-handedness attracted enemies who perhaps persuaded Stalin to destroy him. His last hope was a personal appeal to Stalin, probably written after a confrontation with his accusers: “Comrade Stalin, I ask you to receive me after the meeting.”

“I cannot receive you today,” Stalin wrote back. “Talk to Comrade Molotov.” Within days, he had been arrested.[9] Stalin signed another order for 48,000 executions by quota while Marshal Yegorov followed his “beautiful” wife into the “meat grinder.” But Yezhov was already so exhausted that on 1 December 1937, Stalin was commissioned to supervise his week-long holiday.[10]

In early February, a drunken Blackberry led an expedition to purge Kiev where, aided by the new Ukrainian viceroy Khrushchev,[11] another 30,000 were arrested. Arriving to find that virtually the whole Ukrainian Politburo had been purged under his predecessor Kosior, Khrushchev went on to arrest several commissars and their deputies. The Politburo approved 2,140 victims on Khrushchev’s lists for shooting. Here again, he over-fulfilled his quota. In 1938, 106,119 people were arrested in Khrushchev’s Ukrainian Terror. Yezhov’s visit accelerated the bloodbath: “After Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov’s trip to Ukraine . . . the real destruction of hidden Enemies began,” announced Khrushchev, hailed as an “unswerving Stalinist” for his “merciless uprooting of Enemies.” The NKVD unveiled a conspiracy to poison horses and arrested two professors as Nazi agents. Khrushchev tested the so-called poison and discovered that it did not kill horses. Only after three different commissions had been appointed did he prove this particular conspiracy to be false—but one suspects that Khrushchev only questioned the NKVD’s work when Stalin had signalled his displeasure.[12]

In his cups in Kiev, Yezhov displayed alarming recklessness, boasting that the Politburo was “in his hands.” He could arrest anyone he wanted, even the leaders. One night he was literally carried home from a banquet. It could not be long before Stalin heard of his excesses, if not his dangerous boasting.[13]

Yezhov returned in time for the third and last show trial of the “Anti-Soviet Bloc of Rightists and Trotskyites” which opened on 2 March, starring Bukharin, Rykov and Yagoda, who admitted killing Kirov and Gorky among others. Bukharin scored his own private triumph in a confession of guilt, laced with oblique Aesopian mockery of Stalin and Yezhov’s infantile plots. But this changed nothing. Yezhov attended the executions. He is said to have ordered Yagoda to be beaten: “Come on, hit him for all of us.”

But there was a hint of humanity when it came to the death of his old drinking companion, Yagoda’s ex-secretary Bulanov: he had him given some brandy.[14]

When it was over, Yezhov proposed a fourth super-trial against the Polish spies in the Comintern, which he had been preparing for months. But Stalin cancelled the trial. He rarely pursued one policy to the exclusion of all others: Stalin’s antennae sensed that the massacre was exhausting his own lieutenants, especially the louche Blackberry himself.

 

 

25. Beria and the Weariness of Hangmen

On 4 April, Yezhov was appointed Commissar of Water Transport which made some sense since the building of canals was the task of the NKVD’s slave labour. But there was a worrying symmetry because Yagoda had been appointed to a similar Commissariat on his dismissal. Meanwhile Yezhov ravaged even the Politburo: Postyshev was being interrogated; Eikhe of West Siberia was arrested. Stalin promoted Kosior from Kiev to Moscow as Soviet Deputy Premier. However, in April 1938, Kosior’s brother was arrested. His one hope was to denounce his kin.

“I’m living under suspicion and distrust,” he wrote to Stalin. “You can’t imagine how that feels to an innocent man. The arrest of my brother casts a shadow over me too . . . I swear on my life I’ve not only never suspected the real nature of Casimir Kosior, he was never close to me . . . Why has he invented all this? I can’t understand it but Comrade Stalin, it was all invented from start to finish . . . I ask you Comrade Stalin and all the Politburo to let me explain myself. I am a victim of an Enemy’s lies. Sometimes I think this is a silly dream. . .” How often these victims compared their plight to a “dream.” On 3 May he was arrested, followed by Chubar. Kaganovich claimed, “I protected Kosior and Chubar,” but faced with their handwritten confessions, “I gave up.”[15]

Yezhov, living a vampiric nocturnal existence of drinking and torture sessions, was being crushed under the weight of his work. Stalin noticed Blackberry’s degeneration. “You call the ministry,” Stalin complained, “he’s left for the Central Committee. You call the Central Committee, he’s left for the ministry. You send a messenger to his apartment and there he’s dead drunk.”[16] The pressure on these slaughtermen was immense: just as Himmler later lectured his SS butchers on their special work, so now Stalin worked hard to reassure and encourage his men. But not all of them were strong enough to stand the pace.

The executioners survived by drinking. Even the sober purgers were dizzy with death. The official investigating the Belorussian Military District admitted to Stalin that “I didn’t lose my teeth but I must confess . . . I became disorientated for a while.” Stalin reassured him. Even dread Mekhlis almost had a breakdown at the beginning of the Terror when he still ran Pravda, writing an extraordinary letter to Stalin that gives a fascinating window onto the pressures of being a Stalinist potentate in the whirlwind of terror:

Dear Comrade Stalin,

My nerves did not stand up. I did not comport myself as a Bolshevik; especially I feel the pain of my words in our “personal talk” when I personally owed my whole life and my Partiinost to you. I feel absolutely crushed. These years take away from us a lot of people . . . I must run Pravda in a situation when there is no secretary and no editor, when we have not approved a theme, when I found myself finally in the role of “persecuted editor.” This is organized bedlam which can eat up everybody. And it has eaten up people! In the last days, I’ve felt ill without sleep and only able to get to sleep at eleven or twelve in the morning . . . I’m all the more frantic in my apartment after sleepless nights at the newspaper. It’s time to relieve me [of this job]. I can’t be chief of Pravda when I’m sick and sleepless, incapable of following what is happening in the country, economics, art and literature, never getting the chance to go to the theatre. I had to tell you this personally but it was silly, lying. Forgive me my dear Comrade Stalin for that unpleasant minute I gave you. For me it’s very hard to experience such a trauma!

 

The Procurator-General Vyshinsky also felt the pressure, finding this on his desk: “Everyone knows you’re a Menshevik. After using you, Stalin will sentence you to Vishka . . . Run away . . . Remember Yagoda. That’s your destiny. The Moor has done his duty. The Moor can go.”

Constantly drunk, Yezhov sensed Stalin was, as he later wrote to his master, “dissatisfied with the NKVD work which deteriorated my mood still further.”[17] He made frantic attempts to prove his worth: he was said to have suggested renaming Moscow as “Stalinodar.” This was laughed off. Instead Yezhov was called upon to kill his own NKVD appointees whom he had protected. In early 1938, Stalin and Yezhov decided to liquidate the veteran Chekist Abram Slutsky, but since he headed the Foreign Department, they devised a plan so as not to scare their foreign agents. On 17 February, Frinovsky invited Slutsky to his office where another of Yezhov’s deputies came up behind him and drew a mask of chloroform over his face. He was then injected with poison and died right there in the office. It was officially announced that he had died of a heart attack.[18] Soon the purge began to threaten those closer to Yezhov.[19] When his protégé Liushkov was recalled from the Far East, Yezhov tipped him off. Liushkov defected to the Japanese. Yezhov was so rattled by this fiasco that he asked Frinovsky to go with him to tell Stalin: “On my own I did not have the strength.” Yezhov “literally went mad.” Stalin rightly suspected Yezhov of warning Liushkov.[20]

Sensing his rising doubts, Stalin’s magnates, who had proved their readiness to kill, began to denounce Yezhov’s degeneracy and lies. Zhdanov in particular was said to oppose Yezhov’s Terror. Zhdanov’s son Yury claims his father had wanted to talk to Stalin alone but Yezhov was always present: “Father finally managed to see Stalin tête-à-tête and said, ‘Political provocation is going on . . .’ ” This is convincing because Zhdanov was closest to Stalin personally but Malenkov’s children tell a similar story. Molotov and Yezhov had a row in the Politburo in mid-1938. Stalin ordered the latter to apologize. When another NKVD agent, Alexander Orlov, the resident agent in Spain, defected, Yezhov was so scared of Stalin that he tried to withhold this information.

On 29 July, Stalin signed another death list that included more of Yezhov’s protégés. Yezhov was so distraught with fear and foreboding that he started shooting prisoners who might incriminate him. Uspensky, the Ukrainian NKVD chief, was in Moscow and discovered that a thousand people were going to be shot in the next five days. “The tracks should be covered,” Yezhov warned him. “All investigation cases should be finished in an accelerated procedure so it’ll be impossible to make sense of it.”[21]

Stalin gently told Yezhov that he needed some help in running the NKVD and asked him to choose someone. Yezhov requested Malenkov but Stalin wanted to keep him in the Central Committee so someone, probably Kaganovich, proposed Beria. Stalin may have wanted a Caucasian, perhaps convinced that the cut-throat traditions of the mountains—blood feuds, vendettas and secret murders—suited the position. Beria was a natural, the only First Secretary who personally tortured his victims. The blackjack—the zhguti—and the truncheon—the dubenka—were his favourite toys. He was hated by many of the Old Bolsheviks and family members around the Leader. With the whispering, plotting and vengeful Beria at his side, Stalin felt able to destroy his own polluted, intimate world.

Yezhov probably tried to arrest Beria, but it was too late. Stalin had already seen Beria during the Supreme Soviet on 10 August. Beria was coming to Moscow.[22]

He had come a long way since 1931. Beria, now thirty-six, was complex and talented with a first-class brain. He was witty, a font of irreverent jokes, mischievous anecdotes and withering put-downs. He managed to be a sadistic torturer as well as a loving husband and warm father but he was already a priapic womanizer whom power would distort into a sexual predator. A skilled manager, he was the only Soviet leader whom “one could imagine becoming Chairman of General Motors,” as his daughter-in-law put it later. He could run vast enterprises with a mixture of villainous threats—“I’ll grind you to powder”—and meticulous precision. “Everything that depended on Beria had to function with the precision . . . of a clock” while “the two things he could not bear were wordiness and vagueness of expression.”[23] He was “a good organizer, businesslike and capable,” Stalin had told Kaganovich as early as 1932, possessing the “bull nerves” and indefatigability that were necessary for survival at Stalin’s court. He was a “most clever man,” admitted Molotov, “inhumanly energetic—he could work a week without sleep.”[24]

Beria had the “singular ability to inspire both fear and enthusiasm.” “Idolized” by his own henchmen even though he was often harsh and rude, he would shout: “We’ll arrest you and let you rot in the camps . . . we’ll turn you into camp dust.” A young man like Alyosha Mirtskhulava, whom Beria promoted in the Georgian Party, was still praising Beria for his “humanity, strength, efficiency and patriotism” when he was interviewed for this book in 2002.[25] Yet Beria liked to boast about his victims: “Let me have one night with him and I’ll have him confessing he’s the King of England.” His favourite movies were Westerns but he identified with the Mexican bandits. Beria was well-educated for a Bolshevik magnate. Nevertheless, Stalin teased this architect manqué that his pince-nez were made of clear glass, worn to give an impression of intellectual gravitas.

This deft intriguer, coarse psychopath and sexual adventurer would also have cut throats, seduced ladies-in-waiting and poisoned goblets of wine at the courts of Genghis Khan, Suleiman the Magnificent or Lucrezia Borgia. But this “zealot,” as Svetlana called him, worshipped Stalin in these earlier years—theirs was the relationship of monarch and liege—treating him like a Tsar instead of the first comrade. The older magnates treated Stalin respectfully but familiarly, but even Kaganovich praised him in the Bolshevik lexicon. Beria, however, said, “Oh yes, you are so right, absolutely true, how true” in an obsequious way, recalled Svetlana. “He was always emphasizing that he was devoted to my father and it got through to Stalin that whatever he said, this man supported him.” Bearing a flavour of his steamy Abkhazia to Stalin’s court, Beria was to become even more complex, powerful and depraved, yet less devoted to Marxism as time went on but in 1938, this “colossal figure,” as Artyom puts it, changed everything.[26]

Beria, like many before him, tried to refuse his promotion. There is no reason to doubt his sincerity—Yagoda had just been shot and the writing was on the wall for Yezhov. His wife Nina did not want to move—but Beria was rapaciously ambitious. When Stalin proposed Beria as NKVD First Deputy, Yezhov pathetically suggested that the Georgian might be a good commissar in his own right. “No, a good deputy,” Stalin reassured him.

Stalin sent Vlasik down to arrange the move. In August, after hurrying back to Georgia to anoint a successor to run Tiflis, Beria arrived in Moscow where, on 22 August 1938, he was appointed First Deputy Narkom of the NKVD. The family were assigned an apartment in the doom-laden House on the Embankment. Stalin arrived to inspect the flat and was not impressed. The bosses lived much better in the warm fertile Caucasus, with its traditions of luxury, wine and plentiful fruit, than elsewhere: Beria had resided in an elegant villa in Tiflis. Stalin suggested they move into the Kremlin but Beria’s wife was unenthusiastic. So finally Stalin chose the Georgian new boy an aristocratic villa on Malaya Nikitskaya in the centre of the city, once the home of a Tsarist General Kuropatkin, where he lived splendidly by Politburo standards. Only Beria had his own mansion.

Stalin treated the newly arrived Berias like a long-lost family. He adored the statuesque blonde Nina Beria whom he always treated “like a daughter”: when the new Georgian leader Candide Charkviani was invited to dinner chez Beria, there was a phone call and a sudden flurry of activity.

“Stalin’s coming!” Nina said, frantically preparing Georgian food. Moments later, Stalin swept in. At the Georgian supra, Stalin and Beria sang together. Even after the Terror, Stalin had not lost a certain spontaneity.[27]

Beria and Yezhov ostensibly became friends: Beria called his boss “dear Yozhik,” even staying at his dacha. But it could not last in the jungle of Stalin’s court. Beria attended most meetings with Yezhov and took over the intelligence departments. Beria waged a quiet campaign to destroy Blackberry: he invited Khrushchev for dinner where he warned him about Malenkov’s closeness to Yezhov. Khrushchev realized that Beria was really warning him about his own friendship with Yezhov. No doubt Beria had the same chat with Malenkov. But the most telling evidence is the archives: Beria finagled Vyshinsky into complaining to Stalin about Yezhov’s slowness.[28] Stalin did not react but Molotov ordered Yezhov: “It is necessary to pay special attention to Comrade Beria and hurry up. Molotov.” That weather vane of Stalin’s favour, Poskrebyshev, stopped calling Yezhov by the familiar ty and started visiting Beria instead.[29]

Beria brought a new spirit to the NKVD: Yezhov’s frenzy was replaced with a tight system of terror administration that became the Stalinist method of ruling Russia. But this new efficiency was no consolation to the victims. Beria worked with Yezhov on the interrogations of the fallen magnates, Kosior, Chubar and Eikhe, who were cruelly tortured. Chubar appealed to Stalin and Molotov, revealing his agonies.[30]

Stalin, Blackberry and Beria now turned to the Far East where the army, under the gifted Marshal Blyukher, had largely escaped the Terror. In late June, the “gloomy demon,” Mekhlis, descended on Blyukher’s command with rabid blood-lust. Setting up his headquarters in his railway carriage like a Civil War chieftain, he was soon sending Stalin and Voroshilov telegrams like this: “The Special Railway Corps leaves bits and pieces of dubious people all over the place ...There are 46 German Polish Lithuanian Latvian Galician commanders . . . I have to go to Vladivostok to purge the corps.” Once there, he boasted to Stalin, “I dismissed 215 political workers, most of them arrested. But the purge . . . is not finished. I think it’s impossible to leave Khabarovsk without even more harsh investigations . . .”

When Voroshilov and Budyonny tried to protect officers, Mekhlis sneaked on Voroshilov (they hated each other) to Stalin: “I reported to CC and Narkom (Voroshilov) about the situation in the Secret Service Department. There are a lot of dubious people and spies there . . . Now C. Voroshilov orders the cancellation of the trial . . . I can’t agree with the situation.” Even Kaganovich thought Mekhlis “was cruel, he sometimes overdid it!”

As Mekhlis headed east, the Japanese Kwangtung Army probed Soviet defences west of Lake Khasan, leading to a full-scale battle. Blyukher attacked the Japanese between 6 and 11 August and drove them back with heavy losses. Encouraged by Mekhlis, and alarmed by the losses and Blyukher’s hesitations, Stalin berated the Marshal down the telephone: “Tell me honestly, Comrade Blyukher, do you really want to fight the Japanese? If you don’t, then tell me straight, like a good Communist.”

“The sharks have arrived,” Blyukher told his wife. “They want to eat me. Either they eat me or I eat them, but the latter is unlikely.” The killer shark sealed Blyukher’s fate. Mekhlis arrested four of Blyukher’s staff, requesting Stalin and Voroshilov to let him “shoot all four without prosecution by my special order.” Blyukher was sacked, recalled and arrested on 22 October 1938.[31]

“Now I am done for!” sobbed Yezhov in his office, as he went on executing any prisoners who “may turn against us.” On 29 September, he lost much of his power when Beria was appointed to run the heart of the NKVD: State Security (GUGB). He now co-signed Yezhov’s orders. Blackberry tried to strike back: he proposed to Stalin that Stanislas Redens, Beria’s enemy married to Anna Alliluyeva, become his other deputy. There was no hope of this.

Yezhov sat boozing at his dacha with his depressed cronies, warning that they would soon be destroyed, and fantasizing about killing his enemies: “Immediately remove all people posted in the Kremlin by Beria,” he loudly ordered the head of Kremlin security during one such bout, “and replace them with reliable people.” Soon he said, in a slurred voice, that Stalin should be killed.[32]

 

 

26. The Tragedy and Depravity of the Yezhovs

News of the lion-hunting literary sex life of Yevgenia Yezhova suddenly reached Stalin. Sholokhov, one of his favourite novelists, had started an affair with her. Yezhov bugged his room at the National Hotel and was furious to read the blow-by-blow account of how “they kissed each other” then “lay down.” Yezhov was so intoxicated and jealous that he slapped Yevgenia in the presence of their lissom house guest, Zinaida Glikina (with whom he was sleeping) but later forgave her. Sholokhov realized he was being followed and complained to Stalin and Beria. Stalin summoned Blackberry to the Politburo where he apologized to the novelist.[33]

The magnates steered cautiously between Yezhov and Beria. When Yezhov arrested one commissar, Stalin sent Molotov and Mikoyan to investigate. Back at the Kremlin, Mikoyan acclaimed the man’s innocence and Beria attacked Yezhov’s case. “Yezhov displayed an ambiguous smile,” wrote Mikoyan, “Beria looked pleased” but “Molotov’s face was like a mask.” The Commissar[34] became what Mikoyan called a “lucky stiff,” back from the dead. Stalin released him.[35]

When one NKVD officer needed the chief’s signature, Yezhov was nowhere to be found. Beria told him to drive out to Yezhov’s dacha and get his signature. There he found a man who was either “fatally ill or had spent the night drinking heavily.” Regional NKVD bosses started to denounce Yezhov.[36]

The darkness began to descend on Yezhov’s family where his silly, sensual wife was unwittingly to play the terrible role of black widow spider: most of her lovers were to die. She herself was too sensitive a flower for Yezhov’s world. Both she and Yezhov were promiscuous but then they lived in a world of high tension, dizzy power over life and death, and dynamic turmoil where men rose and fell around them. If there was justice in Yezhov’s fall, it was a tragedy for Yevgenia and little Natasha, to whom he was a kind father. A pall fell on Yevgenia’s literary salon. When a friend walked her home to the Kremlin after a party, she herself reflected that Babel was in danger because he had been friends with arrested Trotskyite generals: “Only his European fame could save him . . .” She herself was in greater peril.[37]

Yezhov learned that Beria was going to use Yevgenia, an “English spy” from her time in London, against him so he asked for a divorce in September. The divorce was sensible: in other cases, it actually saved the life of the divorcée. But the tension almost broke the nervy Yevgenia, who went on holiday to the Crimea with Zinaida to recover. It seems that Yezhov was trying to protect his wife from arrest, hence her loving and grateful letter to him.

“Kolyushenka!” she wrote to her beleaguered husband. “I really ask you—I insist that I remain in control of my life. Kolya darling! I earnestly beg you to check up on my whole life, everything about me . . . I cannot reconcile myself to the thought that I am under suspicion of committing crimes I never committed . . .”

Their world was shrinking daily: Yezhov had managed to have her ex-husband Gladun shot before Beria took control of the NKVD, but another ex-lover, the publisher Uritsky, was being interrogated. He revealed her affair with Babel. Yezhov’s secretary and friends were arrested too. Yezhov summoned Yevgenia back to Moscow.

Yevgenia waited at the dacha with her daughter Natasha and her friend Zinaida. She was desperately worried about the family—and who can blame her? Her nerves cracked. In hospital, they diagnosed an “asthenic-depressive condition perhaps cyclothymia,” sending her to a sanatorium near Moscow.

When Zinaida was arrested, Yevgenia wrote to Stalin: “I beg you Comrade Stalin to read this letter . . . I am treated by professors but what sense does it make if I am burned by the thought that you distrust me? . . . You are dear and beloved to me.” Swearing on her daughter’s life that she was honest, she admitted that “in my personal life, there have been mistakes about which I could tell you, and all of it because of jealousy.” Stalin doubtless already knew all her Messalinian exploits. She made the sacrificial offer: “Let them take away my freedom, my life . . . but I will not give up the right to love you as everybody does who loves the country and the Party.” She signed off: “I feel like a living corpse. What am I to do? Forgive my letter written in bed.” Stalin did not reply.

The trap was swinging shut on Yevgenia and her Kolyushenka. On 8 October, Kaganovich drafted a Politburo resolution on the NKVD. On 17 November, a Politburo commission denounced “very serious faults in the work of the Organs of NKVD.” The deadlytroikas were dissolved. Stalin and Molotov signed a report, disassociating themselves from the Terror.[38]

At the 7 November parade, Yezhov appeared on the Mausoleum but lingered behind Stalin. Then he disappeared and was replaced by Beria in the blue cap and uniform of a Commissar First Class of State Security. When Stalin ordered the arrest of Yezhov’s friend, Uspensky, Ukrainian NKVD chief, the dwarf forewarned him. Uspensky faked suicide and went on the run. Stalin (probably rightly) suspected that Yezhov was bugging his phones.

In her own way, Yevgenia loved Yezhov, despite all their infidelities, and adored their daughter Natasha, because she was willing to sacrifice herself to save them. Her friend Zinaida Ordzhonikidze, Sergo’s widow, visited her in hospital, a heroic act of loyalty. Yevgenia gave her a letter for Yezhov in which she offered to commit suicide and asked for a sleeping draught. She suggested that he send a little statuette of a gnome when the time came. He sent Luminal, then, a little later, he ordered the maid to take his wife the statuette. Given Yezhov’s dwarfish stature, this deadly gnome seems farcical: perhaps the statuette was an old keepsake representing “darling Kolya” himself from the early days of their romance. When Glikina’s arrest made her own inevitable, Yevgenia sent a note bidding Yezhov goodbye. On 19 November, she took the Luminal.

At 11 p.m., as Yevgenia sank into unconsciousness, Yezhov arrived at the Little Corner, where he found the Politburo with Beria and Malenkov, who attacked him for five hours. Yevgenia died two days later. Yezhov himself reflected that he had been “compelled to sacrifice her to save himself.” She had married a monster but died young to save their daughter which, in its way, was a maternal end to a life devoted to innocent fun. Babel heard that “Stalin can’t understand her death. His own nerves are made of steel so he just can’t understand how, in other people, they give out.” The Yezhovs’ adopted daughter[39] Natasha, nine, was taken in by his ex-wife’s sister and then sent to one of those grim orphanages for the children of Enemies.[40]

Two days after Yevgenia’s death, on 23 November, Yezhov returned for another four hours of criticism from Stalin, Molotov and Voroshilov, after which he resigned from the NKVD. But he remained in limbo as CC Secretary, Commissar of Water Transport, and a candidate Politburo member, living in the Kremlin like a tiny ghost for a little longer, experiencing what his victims had known before him. His friends “turned their back upon me as if I was plague-ridden . . . I never realized the depth of meanness of all these people.” He blamed the Terror on the Vozhd, using a Russian idiom: “God’s will—the Tsar’s trial” with himself as the Tsar and Stalin as God.

Yezhov consoled himself with a series of drunken bisexual orgies in his Kremlin apartment. Inviting two drinking buddies and homosexual lovers from his youth to stay, he enjoyed “the most perverted forms of debauchery.” His nephews brought him girls but he also returned to homosexuality. When one crony, Konstantinov, brought his wife to the party, Yezhov danced the foxtrot with her, pulled out his member, and then slept with her. On the next night, when the long-suffering Konstantinov arrived, they drank and danced to the gramophone until the guest fell asleep only to be awoken: “I felt something in my mouth. When I opened my eyes, I saw that Yezhov had shoved his member into my mouth.” Unzipped and undone, Yezhov awaited his fate.[41]

Beria, whom Stalin nicknamed “The Prosecutor,” was triumphantly appointed Commissar on 25 November,[42] and summoned his Georgian henchmen to Moscow. Having destroyed the entourages of the Old Bolshevik “princes,” Stalin now had to import Beria’s whole gang to destroy Yezhov’s.

Ironically, Beria’s courtiers were much more educated than Kaganovich or Voroshilov but education is no bar to barbarism. The grey-haired, charming and refined Merkulov, a Russified Armenian, who was to write plays under the pseudonym Vsevolod Rok that were performed on Moscow stages, had known Beria since they studied together at the Baku Polytechnic and had joined the Cheka in 1920. Beria, who, like Stalin, coined nicknames for everyone, called him “the Theoretician.” Then there was the renegade Georgian prince (though aristocrats are as plentiful in Georgia as vines) Shalva Tsereteli, once a Tsarist officer and member of the anti-Bolshevik Georgian Legion, who had the air of an old-fashioned gentleman but was Beria’s private assassin, among his other duties in the NKVD’s Special Department. Then there was the bejewelled 300-pound giant—“the worst man God put on the face of the Earth”—Bogdan Kobulov. “A burly oversized Caucasian with muddy brown bullish eyes,” the “fat face of a man [who] likes good living . . . hairy hands, short bow legs,” and a dapper moustache, he was one of those hearty torturers who would have been as at home in the Gestapo as in the NKVD. He was so squat that Beria called him “the Samovar.”

When Kobulov beat his victims, he used his fists, his elephantine weight and his favourite blackjack clubs. He arranged wiretaps of the magnates for Stalin but he also became a court jester, replacing the late Pauker, with his funny accents. He soon proved his usefulness: Beria was interrogating a victim in his office when the prisoner attacked him. Kobulov boasted about what happened next: “I saw the boss [he used the Georgian slang— khozeni] on the floor and I jumped on the fellow and crushed his neck with my own bare hands.” Yet even this brute sensed that his work was not right for he used to visit his mother and sob to her like an overgrown Georgian child: “Mama, mama, what are we doing? One day, I’ll pay for this.”

The arrival of these exotic, strutting Georgians, some even convicted murderers, must have been like Pancho Villa and his banditos riding into a northern town in one of Beria’s favourite movies. Stalin later made a great play of sending some of them home, replacing them with Russians, but he remained very much a Georgian himself. Beria’s men gave Stalin’s entourage a distinctly Caucasian flavour. On the official date of Beria’s appointment, Stalin and Molotov signed off on the shooting of 3,176 people so they were busy.

Beria appeared nightly in Lefortovo prison to torture Marshal Blyukher, assisted by “The Theoretician” Merkulov, “The Samovar” Kobulov, and his top interrogator, Rodos, who worked on the Marshal with such relish that he called out: “Stalin, can you hear what they’re doing to me?” They tortured him so hard that they managed to knock out one of his eyes and he later died of his wounds. Beria drove over to tell Stalin who ordered the body’s incineration. Meanwhile, Beria settled scores, personally arresting Alexander Kosarev, the Komsomol chief, who had once insulted him. Stalin later learned this was a personal vendetta: “They told me Beria was very vindictive but there was no evidence of it,” he reflected years later. “In Kosarev’s case, Zhdanov and Andreyev checked the evidence.”

Beria revelled in the sport of power: Bukharin’s lovely widow, Anna Larina, still only twenty-four, was shown into his Lubianka office by Kobulov who then brought in sandwiches like an infernal Jeeves.

“I should tell you that you look more beautiful than when I last saw you,” Beria told her. “Execution is for one time only. And Yezhov would certainly have executed you.” When she would not betray anyone, Beria and Kobulov stopped flirting. “Whom are you trying to save? After all, Nikolai Ivanovich [Bukharin] is no longer with us . . . You want to live? . . . If you don’t shut up, here’s what you’ll get!” He put a finger to his temple. “So will you promise me to shut up?” She saw that Beria wanted to save her and she promised.[43] But she would not eat Kobulov’s sandwiches.[44]

Stalin was careful not to place himself completely in the hands of Beria: the chief of State Security (First Branch), his personal security, was a sensitive but dangerous position. Two had been shot since Pauker but now Stalin appointed his personal bodyguard, Vlasik, to the job, in charge of the Leader’s security as well as the dachas, food for the kitchens, the car pool and millions of roubles. Henceforth, explains Artyom, Stalin “ruled through Poskrebyshev in political matters and Vlasik in personal ones.” Both were indefatigably industrious—and sleazy.

The two men lived similar lives: their daughters recall how they spent only Sunday at home. Otherwise they were always with Stalin, returning exhausted to sleep. No one knew Stalin better. At home they never discussed politics but chatted about their fishing expeditions. Vlasik, who lived in the elegant villa on Gogolevsky Boulevard, was doggedly loyal, uneducated and drunkenly dissolute: he was already an insatiable womanizer who held parties with Poskrebyshev. He had so many “concubines,” he kept lists of them, forgot their names, and sometimes managed to have a different one in each room at his orgies. He called Stalin Khozyain , but “Comrade Stalin” to his face, rarely joining him at table.

Poskrebyshev’s social status was higher, often joining the magnates at dinner and calling Stalin “Joseph Vissarionovich.” He was the butt and perpetrator of jokes. He sat doggedly at his desk outside Stalin’s office: the Little Corner was his domain. The magnates cultivated him, playing to his dog’s vanity so that he would warn them if Stalin was in a bad mood. Poskrebyshev always called Vyshinsky to say that Stalin was on his way to Kuntsevo so the Procurator could go to bed, and he once protected Khrushchev. He was so powerful that he could even insult the Politburo. The “faithful shield-bearer,” in Khrushchev’s words, played his role in Stalin’s most mundane deeds and the most terrible, boasting later about their use of poison. He was a loving husband to Bronka, and an indulgent father to the two children, Galya by her first husband and his own Natalya. But when the vertushka rang on Sundays, no one else was allowed to answer it. He was proud of his position: when his daughter had an operation, he lectured her that she had to behave in a way that befitted their station. Poskrebyshev worked closely with Beria: they often visited each other’s families but if there was business to conduct, they walked in the garden. But ultimately both Vlasik and Poskrebyshev were obstacles to Beria’s power.[45] The same could no longer be said of the Alliluyev family.

 

 

27. Death of the Stalin Family: A Strange Proposal and the Housekeeper

Letting Beria into the family was like locking a fox in a chicken coop but Stalin shares responsibility for their fates. “All our family,” wrote Svetlana, “was completely baffled as to why Stalin made Beria—a provincial secret policeman—so close to himself and the government in Moscow.” This was precisely why Stalin had promoted him: no one was sacred to Beria.

The magnates and retainers all grumbled constantly about the self-importance of the “aunties.” Impertinent with the greatness of his new power and burning with the inferiority complex of a scorned provincial, Beria was determined to prove himself by destroying these glamorous but snobbish members of the new nobility. In the early thirties, Beria had tried to flirt with Zhenya while her husband and Stalin were sitting nearby.

Zhenya strode up to Stalin: “If this bastard doesn’t leave me alone, I’ll smash his pince-nez.” Everyone laughed. Beria was embarrassed. But when Beria began to appear more regularly at Kuntsevo, he still flirted with Zhenya who appealed to Stalin: “Joseph! He’s trying to squeeze my knee!” Stalin probably regarded Beria as something of a card. The family were typical of the élite he was trying to destroy. When Beria turned up in a turtleneck pullover for dinner, Zhenya, who was always dressed to the nines without a hint of Bolshevik modesty, said loudly, “How dare you come to dinner like this?” Grandfather Alliluyev regularly described Beria as an “Enemy.”[46]

In November 1938, Stalin’s family life really ended. Beria expanded the Terror to include anyone connected to Yezhov, who had not only appointed Stalin’s brother-in-law, Stanislas Redens, to run the NKVD in Kazakhstan but had even requested him as his deputy: this was the kiss of death. Relations had certainly been warm when Stalin received the Redens family before they set off for Alma-Ata. We know little about Redens’s role in the Terror but thousands in Moscow and Kazakhstan had been slaughtered on his watch. The arrival of Beria, his nemesis in Tiflis in 1931, was bad news but even without it, Stanislas would probably have been doomed.[47]

Meanwhile Pavel Alliluyev’s job, as a tank forces commissar, placed him in harm’s way: close to the executed generals, he was also involved in spying on German tank production. When he saw the Soviet spy Orlov before his defection, Alliluyev warned him: “Don’t ever inquire about the Tukhachevsky affair. Knowing about it is like inhaling poison gas.” Then Pavel had been out in the Far East where the generals appealed to him and he had flown back, according to his daughter Kira, with evidence that proved their innocence. He clearly did not understand that evidence only existed to persuade others, not to prove guilt. Pavel is said to have put together a letter for Stalin, co-signed by three generals, suggesting the Terror be brought to a close. The generals’ timing seemed fortuitous; the Terror was ebbing. Stalin did not openly punish them, but he had clearly tired of Pavel’s interference.[48]

After holidaying in Sochi, Pavel returned on 1 November. The next morning, Pavel ate breakfast and went to the office where he found that most of his department had been arrested, according to Svetlana: “He attempted to save certain people, trying to get hold of my father, but it was no use.” At two in the afternoon, Zhenya was called: “What did you give your husband to eat? He’s feeling sick.” Zhenya wanted to rush over but they stopped her. He was sent to the Kremlevka clinic. In the words of the official medical report, “When he was admitted, he was unconscious, cyanotic and apparently dying. The patient did not recover consciousness.” This was strange since the doctor who telephoned Zhenya to tell her this news said: “Why did it take you so long? He had something to tell you. He kept asking why Zhenya didn’t come. He’s already dead.” So died the brother who had given Nadya her pistol. The inconsistencies in an already suspicious death, at a time when medical murder was almost routine, makes foul play possible. Stalin kept the death certificate. Zhenya was later accused of murdering Pavel. Stalin sometimes accused others of his own crimes. We will never know the truth.

“The next time I saw him,” Kira says, “was lying in state at the Hall of Columns. He was only 44, and he was lying there all sunburnt, very handsome with his long eyelashes.” Looking into the casket, Sergei Alliluyev mused that there was no more tragic thing than to bury your own children.[49]

Redens himself headed back to Moscow where he arrived on 18 November. At Kuntsevo, Vasily heard Beria demand that Stalin let him arrest Redens. “But I trust Redens,” replied Stalin “very decisively.” To Vasily’s surprise, Malenkov supported Beria. This was the beginning of the alliance between these two who would not have pressed the arrest without knowing Stalin’s instincts: these scenes of pretend argument resemble the mooting exercises practised by trainee lawyers. Yet Stalin was highly suggestible. Redens had the misfortune, like Pavel Alliluyev, to be in two or three overlapping circles of suspicion. Beria is always blamed for turning Stalin against his other brother-in-law but there was more to it than that. Stalin had removed Redens from the Ukraine in 1932. He was close to Yezhov. And he was a Pole. Stalin listened to Beria and Malenkov and then said: “In that case, sort it out at the Central Committee.” As Svetlana put it, “My father would not protect him.” On the 22nd, Redens was arrested on his way to work and was never seen again.

Anna Redens started phoning Stalin. She was no longer welcome at Zubalovo. She could not get through to Stalin. “Then I’ll call Voroshilov, Kaganovich and Molotov,” she sobbed. When the children arrived, they found their mother, hysterical at the disappearance of her beloved Stan, lying in bed reading Alexandre Dumas. She appealed to everyone until finally Stalin took her call. Stalin summoned her to the Little Corner. Redens “would be brought and we shall make an inquiry about all this,” but he made one condition: “And bring Grandfather Sergei Yakovlevich with you.” Sergei, who had now lost two children, no longer waited for Stalin on the sofa every night but he agreed to come. At the last moment, he backed out. Beria either threatened him, or perhaps Sergei thought Redens was guilty of something in his unsavoury work at the Lubianka: Redens’s son Leonid stressed that there were tensions between Old Bolsheviks like Sergei and the brash élite like Redens. Grandmother Olga went instead, a brave but foolish move since Stalin loathed interfering women.

“Why have you come? No one called you!” he snarled at her. Anna shouted at Stalin, who had her removed.[50] Redens and the Svanidzes were in jail; Pavel Alliluyev dead. Stalin had allowed the Terror to ravage his own circle. When the Bulgarian Communist Georgi Dmitrov appealed for some arrested comrades, Stalin shrugged: “What can I do for them, Georgi? All my own relatives are in prison too.” This is a revealing excuse. Certainly, with Pavel, Nadya’s pistol must have always been on his mind but so were his military connections and intercession for “Enemies.” Perhaps Stalin was settling private scores against his over-familiar, interfering family who reminded him of Nadya’s rejection. But he did not regard the Terror as a private spree: he was cleansing his encircled country of spies to safeguard his vast achievements before war broke out. His family were among the casualties. He regarded them as his own sacrifice as the supreme pontiff of Bolshevism. But he was also asserting his own separation from private ties and, perhaps refreshingly, shaking off old obligations of family and friendship[51]: his vendettas were those of the Party because, as he told Vasily, “I’m not Stalin . . . Stalin IS Soviet power!” But they also provided a living excuse for demanding that his comrades sacrifice theirown families. Nonetheless, he could have saved anyone he wanted and he did not.[52] The familial world of Stalin and his children was still shrinking.

Svetlana lost another part of her support system: Carolina Til, the dependable housekeeper, that cosy link to her mother, was sacked in the purge of Germans. Beria found her replacement in a niece of his wife Nina from Georgia—though as ever, his true motives are unclear. Svetlana’s new governess was Alexandra Nakashidze, tall, slim, long-legged, with perfect pale skin and long thick blue-black hair. A naïve and poorly educated girl from a Georgian village, this NKVD lieutenant entered this increasingly monocoloured world like a purple-feathered peacock. The Alliluyev and Mikoyan boys are still struck by her today.

Svetlana resented her so-called governess. Nakashidze’s arrival shows Beria’s special role in the family: could she be his spy in Stalin’s household that was otherwise controlled by Vlasik? We know that the court encouraged Stalin to remarry: was she there for Stalin?[53] However, there was a more obvious candidate almost within the family.

Zhenya Alliluyeva was a widow but she was convinced her husband had been murdered by Beria. Was she guilty about her relationship with Stalin? There is no evidence of this. Her husband had surely known (or chosen not to know) what was going on, but the relationship with Stalin, such as it was, had already cooled by 1938. But now Stalin missed her and made a strange, indirect proposal to her. Beria came to see Zhenya and said: “You’re such a nice person, and you’re so fine looking, do you want to move in and be housekeeper at Stalin’s house?” Usually this is interpreted as a mysterious threat from Beria but it is surely unlikely that he would have made such a proposal without Stalin’s permission, especially since she could have phoned him to discuss it. In Stalin’s mind, a “housekeeper” was his ideal baba, the khozyaika. This was surely a semi–marriage proposal, an awkward attempt to salvage the warmth of the old days from the destruction that he himself had unleashed. It was unforgivably clumsy to send Beria, whom Zhenya loathed, on this sensitive mission but that is typical of Stalin. If one has any doubt about this analysis, Stalin’s reaction to Zhenya’s next move may confirm it.

Zhenya was alarmed, fearing that Beria would frame her for trying to poison Stalin. She swiftly married an old friend, named N. V. Molochnikov, a Jewish engineer whom she had met in Germany, perhaps the lover who had almost broken up her marriage. Stalin was appalled, claiming that it was indecent so soon after Pavel’s death. Beria’s proposal puts Stalin’s hurt in a slightly different light. Beria fanned the flames by suggesting that perhaps Zhenya had poisoned her husband, an idea with resonance in this poisoners’ coven. Some say the body was dug up twice for tests. In spite of the poisoning allegations, Stalin retained his fascination with Zhenya, going out of his way just before the war to quiz her daughter Kira: “How’s your mother?” Zhenya and Anna Redens were banned from the Kremlin and Stalin looked elsewhere for his “housekeeper.”[54]

A young maid named Valentina Vasilevna Istomina had worked at Zubalovo since her late teens in the early thirties. In 1938, she came to work at Kuntsevo. Stalin was attracted to a specific ideal: the busty, blue-eyed, big-haired and retroussé-nosed Russian peasant woman, submissive and practical, a baba who could make a home without in any way becoming involved in his other life. Zhenya had the looks but there was nothing submissive about her. He also found the same looks coupled with haughtiness in the top artistes of the time. Stalin was an avid attender of the theatre, opera and ballet, regularly visiting the Politburo (formerly imperial) loge in the Bolshoi or the Moscow Arts Theatre. His favourite singers were the soprano Natalya Schpiller, who was a blue-eyed Valkyrie, and the mezzo Vera Davydova. He liked to instruct them “in a fatherly way” but he also played one off against the other. He acted being in love with Davydova who later boasted that he proposed marriage: if so, it was only a joke. He teased her by suggesting that she improve her singing by copying Schpiller. When Davydova appeared in a glittery belt, he told her, “Look, Schpiller’s a beguiling woman too but she dresses modestly for official receptions.”[55]

These divas were much too glamorous for Stalin but there was no shortage of available admirers, as Vlasik told his daughter. There are many stories of women invited to Kuntsevo: Mirtskhulava, a young Georgian official, remembers Stalin at a Kremlin dinner in 1938 sending him to ask a girl in his Komsomol delegation if she was the daughter of some Old Bolshevik, then inviting her to the dacha. Stalin insisted Mirtskhulava ask her secretly, without either the knowledge of the magnates at his table or of the Georgians. The same happened with a beautiful Georgian pilot whom he met at the Tushino air show in 1938 and who regularly visited Stalin.[56]

This was probably the pattern of his trivial dalliances but what happened at Kuntsevo is beyond our knowledge. Everyone who knew Stalin insists that he was no womanizer and he was famously inhibited about his body. We know nothing about his sexual tastes but Nadya’s letters suggest they had a passionate relationship. A fascinating glimpse into his relations with women—perhaps connected to his views on sex—is provided by his attitude to dancing. He liked making Russian dance steps and kicks on his own but dancing à deux made him nervous. He told the tenor Kozlovsky at a party that he would not dance because he had damaged his arm in exile and so “could not hold a woman by the waist.”

Stalin warned his son Vasily against “women with ideas,” whom he found uncomfortable: “we’ve known that kind, herrings with ideas, skin and bones.” He was most at home with the women of the service staff. The maids, cooks and guards at his houses were all employed by Vlasik’s department and all signed confidentiality contracts though these were hardly necessary in this kingdom of fear. Even when the USSR collapsed, very few of them ever spoke.[57] The Kremlin hairdresser, who so upset Nadya, was one of these and so was his maid Valentina Istomina, known as Valechka, who gradually became the mainstay of Stalin’s home life.

“She laughed all the time and we really liked her,” said Svetlana, “she was very young, with pink cheeks and she was liked by everyone. She was a pleasant figure, typically Russian.” She was Stalin’s “ideal” woman, buxom and neat, “round-faced and pug-nosed,” primitive, simple and unlettered; she “served at table deftly, never joined in the conversation,” yet she was always there when she was needed. “She had light brown mousy hair—I remember her well from about 1936, nothing special, not fat not thin but very friendly and smiling,” says Artyom Sergeev. Out of Stalin’s presence, she was fun in an unthreatening way, even shrewd: “She was a clever one, talkative, a chatterbox,” recalled one of Stalin’s bodyguards.

Valechka was promoted to housekeeper, taking care of Stalin’s “clothes, the food, the house and so on and she travelled with him wherever he went. She was a comfortable soul to be quiet with, yet he trusted her and she was devoted to him.” Stalin was farcically proud of the way she prepared his underwear: after the war, one Georgian official was amazed when he showed off the piles of gleaming white smalls in his wardrobe, surely a unique moment in the history of dictators.

At the Kremlin apartment, Valechka often served Svetlana and her friend Martha who recalls her “in her white apron, like a kind woman from the villages, with her fair hair and shapeless figure, not fat though. Always smiling. Svetlana loved her too.” Artyom was one of the few who heard how Stalin spoke to her: “he’d say about her birthday or something, ‘Of course I must give you a present.’ ”

“I don’t need anything, Comrade Stalin,” she replied.

“Well, if I forget, remind me.” At the end of the thirties, Valechka became Stalin’s trusted companion and effectively his secret wife, in a culture when most Bolshevik couples were not formally married. “Valya looked after Father’s creature comforts,” Svetlana said. The court understood that she was his companion and no more was said about it. “Whether or not Istomina was Stalin’s wife is nobody’s business,” said the ageing Molotov. “Engels lived with his housekeeper.” Budyonny and Kalinin “married” their housekeepers.

“My father said she was very close to him,” asserts Nadezhda Vlasika. Kaganovich’s daughter-in-law heard from “Iron Lazar”: “I only know that Stalin had one common-law wife. Valechka, his waitress. She loved him.”[58]

Valechka appeared like a jolly, quiet and buxom hospital sister, always wearing a white apron at Stalin’s dinners. No one noticed when she attended Yalta and Potsdam: this was as Stalin wished it. Henceforth Stalin’s private life was frozen in about 1939: the dramas of Nadya and Zhenya that had caused him pain and anger were over. “These matters,” recalled the Polish Communist Jakob Berman, who was often at Kuntsevo during the forties, “were arranged with extreme discretion and never filtered out beyond his closest circle. Stalin was always very careful there shouldn’t be any gossip about him . . . Stalin understood the danger of gossip.” If other men could be betrayed by their wives, there at least he was safe. He sometimes asked Valechka’s political opinions as an ordinary person. Nonetheless, for this political man, she was no companion. He remained lonely.[59]

Between 24 February and 16 March 1939, Beria presided over the executions of 413 important prisoners, including Marshal Yegorov and ex-Politburo members Kosior, Postyshev and Chubar: he was already living in the dacha of the last of these. Now he suggested to Stalin that they call a halt, or there would be no one left to arrest. Poskrebyshev marked up the old Central Committee with VN—Enemy of the People—and the date of execution. The next day, Stalin reflected to Malenkov: “I think we’re well and truly rid of the opposition millstone. We need new forces, new people . . .” The message was sent down the vertikal of power: when Mekhlis demanded more arrests in the army for “lack of revolutionary loyalty,” Stalin replied: “I propose to limit ourselves to an official reprimand . . . (I don’t see any ill will in their actions—these aren’t mistakes but misunderstandings).”[60]

Blaming all excesses on Yezhov, Stalin protected his other grotesques. The “denunciatrix” of Kiev, Nikolaenko, was discredited. But she once again appealed to Stalin and Khrushchev: “I ask you to check everything, where I was mistaken, where I was lied to and where I was provoked, I’m ready to be punished,” she wrote to Khrushchev. But then, still playing high politics, she warned Stalin: “I’m sure there are too many remnants of Enemies in Kiev . . . Dear Joseph Vissarionovich, I’ve no words to tell you how to understand me but you understand us, your people, without words. I write to you with bitter tears.” Stalin protected her: “Comrade Khrushchev, I ask you to take measures to let Nikolaenko find calm and fruitful work, J.St.”

The victims of his creatures could now appeal to Stalin. Khrulev, who was to be the outstanding Red Army quartermaster during the Second World War, complained to Stalin about the peripatetic, pompous Mekhlis. “The lion is the king of the jungle,” Stalin laughed.

“Yes but Mekhlis’s a dangerous animal,” said Khrulev, “who told me he’d do all he could . . . [to destroy me].”

Stalin smiled genially. “Well if me and you . . . fight Mekhlis together, do you think we’ll manage?” retorted the “lion king.”

Stalin had not forgotten his greatest enemy: Beria and one of the talented dirty tricks specialists in quiet and quick death, Pavel Sudoplatov, were received in the Little Corner where, pacing silently in soft Georgian boots, Stalin laconically ordered: “Trotsky should be eliminated within a year.”[61]

On 10 March 1939, the 1,900 delegates of the Eighteenth Congress gathered[62] to declare the end of a slaughter that had been a success, if slightly marred by Yezhov’s manic excesses. The survivors, from Molotov to Zhdanov, remained at the top but were challenged by the younger generation: Khrushchev joined the Politburo while Beria was elected candidate and “Melanie” Malenkov became a CC Secretary. This leadership ruled the country for the next decade without a single casualty: contrary to his myth, Stalin, a master of divide and rule, could be surprisingly loyal to his protégés. But not to the Blackberry.

Yezhov was on ice yet he still attended the Politburo, sat next to Stalin at the Bolshoi and turned up for work at Water Transport, where he sat through meetings throwing paper darts. He caroused by day but appeared at Congress evening sessions, trying to get permission to speak. “I strongly ask you to talk with me for only one minute,” he wrote to Stalin. “Give me the opportunity.” Still a CC member, he attended the meeting of Party elders where the names for the new body were selected.

No one objected to his name until Stalin called Yezhov forward: “Well what do you think of yourself ? Are you capable of being a member of the Central Committee?” Yezhov protested his devotion to the Party and Stalin—he could not imagine what he had done wrong. Since all the other murderers were being promoted, the dwarf’s bafflement is understandable.

“Is that so?” Stalin started mentioning Enemies close to Yezhov.

“Joseph Vissarionovich!” Yezhov cried out. “You know it was I— I myself—who disclosed their conspiracy! I came to you and reported it . . .”

“Yes yes yes. When you felt you were about to be caught, then you came in a hurry. But what about before that? Were you organizing a conspiracy? Did you want to kill Stalin? Top officials of the NKVD are plotting but you are supposedly not involved. You think I don’t see anything? Do you remember who you sent on a certain date for duty with Stalin? Who? With revolvers? Why revolvers near Stalin? Why? To kill Stalin? Well? Go on, get out of here! I don’t know, comrades, is it possible to keep him as a member of the Central Committee? I doubt it. Of course think about it . . . As you wish . . . But I doubt it.”

Yezhov was determined to spread the guilt and avenge his betrayal by destroying Malenkov, whom he now denounced. On 10 April, Stalin ordered Yezhov to attend a meeting to hear these accusations. Yezhov reported to Malenkov who ritualistically removed Yezhov’s photograph from the array of leadership icons on his office wall like an angel removed from the heavens. Beria and his Georgian prince-executioner, Tsereteli, opened the door and arrested Blackberry, conveying “Patient Number One” to the infirmary inside Sukhanov prison.

The search of Yezhov’s apartment revealed bottles of vodka, empty, half-empty and full, lying around, 115 counter-revolutionary books, guns and those macabre relics: the flattened bullets, wrapped in paper, labelled Zinoviev and Kamenev. More importantly, the search revealed that Yezhov had collected materials about Stalin’s pre-1917 police record: was this evidence that he was an Okhrana spy? There was also evidence against Malenkov.[63] The papers disappeared into Beria’s safe.

Stalin was now so omnipotent that when he mispronounced a word from the podium, every subsequent speaker repeated the mistake. “If I’d said it right,” Molotov reminisced, “Stalin would have felt I was correcting him.” He was very “touchy and proud.”[64]  Europe was on the verge of war and Stalin turned his attention to the tightrope walk between Nazi Germany and the Western democracies. Meanwhile, Zhdanov heralded the end of Yezhov’s slaughter, joking (in execrable taste) about “big Enemies,” “little Enemies” and “wee Enemies” while Stalin and Beria planned some of their most wanton acts of depravity.[65]

---

[1] Bronka: based on the author’s interviews with Natalya Poskrebysheva and stories told to her by her aunt Faina, her half-sister Galina and her nanny. Kira Alliluyeva. Also Brackman’s interviews with Bronislava’s first husband, I. P. Itskov, Secret File, p. 329. Itskov claims Bronka only married Poskrebyshev to save her brother from arrest but this seems premature. Also Volkogonov, p. 155.

 

[2] Yezhova: Yezhov’s and Yevgenia’s lovers: Jansen-Petrov, pp. 123–4. Simon Uritsky’s interrogation quoted in KGB Lit. Archive, p. 56. Polianski, pp. 190–7. Pirozhkova, p. 105. V. F. Nekrasov, Zelezhnyi Narkom, p. 211. S. Povartzov, Prichina smerti-rastrel, pp. 151. Yezhova was from Gomel but grew up in Odessa.

 

[3] There were two Rosa Kaganoviches: Lazar’s sister Rosa died young in 1924 while his niece Rosa lived in Rostov and then moved to Moscow where she still lives. It is possible that they met Stalin but they did not marry him.

[4] Rosa Kaganovich: Kaganovich, pp. 48–50. Jewish women: Sergo B, p. 211. For the myth: see Kahan, Wolf of the Kremlin.

 

[5] Svanidze diary, 5 Mar. 1937. Djugashvili, Ded, Otets, Mat i Drugie, pp. 18–24. Julia adventuress: Svanidze diary, 5 Mar. 1937. RGASPI 44.1.1.340–3, Maria Svanidze to Alyosha Svanidze, n.d. Leonid Redens. Kira Alliluyeva.

 

[6] Svanidze: MR, p. 174. RGASPI 558.11.27.129, Stalin notes to Yezhov. Maria Svanidze papers, RGASPI 44.1.1.33b. Brackman, p. 287. Mikoyan, p. 359. Kira Alliluyeva. Leonid Redens. Svetlana in Richardson, Long Shadow , p. 143.

 

[7] The ancient city of Samara had been renamed after Kuibyshev on his death in 1935.

[8] Did Stalin recall Postyshev’s slight cheekiness in 1931? When Stalin wrote to him to complain about the list of those to receive the Order of Lenin: “We give the Order of Lenin to any old shitters.” Postyshev replied cheerfully that the “shitters” were all approved by Stalin himself.

[9] Postyshev: Getty, pp. 503–11. Khlevniuk, Circle, pp. 231–40. RGASPI 558.11.787.45–6, P. Postyshev to Stalin 16 Mar. 1938. He was arrested 12 Feb. Jansen-Petrov, p. 125. Shitters: RGASPI 558.11.787.6, Stalin to Postyshev on Orders of Lenin, Yezhov holiday 9 Sept. 1931, and Postyshev answers cheekily.

[10] Jansen-Petrov, p. 124, quoted Suvenirov, Tragediya RKKA, p. 23. On drunkenness: FSB 3-os. 6.1.265–70. Frinovsky and Efimov interrogations, N-15301.7. 193–4, in Jansen-Petrov, p. 124. New quotas: 48,000 in Getty, pp. 518–9, and fall of Yegorov, pp. 521–2.

[11] Khrushchev, like other regional bosses such as Beria and Zhdanov, became the object of an extravagant local cult: a “Song of Khrushchev” soon joined the “Song for Beria” and odes to Yezhov in the Soviet songbook.

[12] Shapoval in Taubman, pp. 19–25; KR I, pp. 129–36. Izvestiya TsK KPSS, 2, 1989. Istochnik, 1, 1995. Naumov in Taubman, pp. 88–90, 91–2, 167, 565: people were arrested in the year and a half to 1940.

[13] Jansen-Petrov, p. 134: case of A. I. Uspensky FSB 3.6.1 and 3.6.3. Extra quota: Moskovskie Novosti, 1992, no. 25.

[14] Bukharin trial: Conquest, Terror, pp. 367–425.

 

[15] Kosior and Chubar: RGASPI 558.11.754.122–7, Kosior to Stalin 30 Apr. 1938. KR I, p. 106. Dreams: see Tukhachevsky’s trial. Medvedev, p. 295. Kaganovich, p. 89.

[16] Stalin to aircraft designer Yakovlev, quoted in MR, p. 262.

 

[17] RGASPI 558.11.698.33, Aronstam to Stalin and Stalin’s reply 7 May 1937. RGASPI 558.11.773.94, Mekhlis to Stalin 13 Jan. 1936 or possibly 1937. RGASPI 588.2.156.43, warning to Vyshinsky. Jansen-Petrov, p. 124, quoted Suvenirov, Tragedia RKKA, p. 23. On drunkenness: FSB 3-os.6.1.265–70. Frinovsky and Efimov interrogations, N-15301.7.193–4, in Jansen-Petrov, p. 124. Drunken executioners: Peter Deriabin, Inside Stalin’s Kremlin, p. 42. Parrish, “Yezhov,” pp. 71–7. Yezhov feels Stalin’s dissatisfaction: Jansen-Petrov, p. 143, quoting APRF 7458.3.158–62, Yezhov to Stalin. Even the brutal Beria had at times suffered from the nervous stress of a life in permanent paranoia: “I can’t argue with everyone throughout my lifetime . . . it will ruin my nerves . . . I feel I cannot go on much longer,” he had written earlier in the thirties, Beria, p. 40, L. P. Beria to Ordzhonikidze.

[18] His splendid gravestone in the Novodevichy Cemetery not far from Nadya Stalin’s grave gives no hint of his sinister end.

[19]  “Stalinodar”: Jansen-Petrov, p. 117. Parrish, “Yezhov,” pp. 78–88. Slutsky: Jansen-Petrov, p. 230, quotes FSB case of Frinovsky N-15301.3.117–23. Orlov’s account of this is essentially accurate.

[20] Liushkov: Jansen-Petrov, pp. 144–5. Yezhov’s unsent letter to Stalin: APRF 57.1.265.16–26. Coox, “Lesser of Two Hells,” pp. 145–86; Coox “L’affaire Liushkov: Anatomy of a Defector,” Soviet Studies, pp. 145–86; vol. 8, no. 3, 1967, pp. 405–20.

 

[21] Yury Zhdanov. Volya Malenkova. See also Andrei Malenkov, O moem otse Georgii Malenkove. M. Ebon, Malenkov, pp. 38–9. Starkov, “Narkom Yezhov” in Gerry/Manning (eds.), pp. 35–7. Blinking in light: Leonid Redens. Rees, p. 197. Yezhov and Polish spy and Orlov: Jansen-Petrov, pp. 147, quoting FSB 3-os.6.1.350. Uspensky, tracks covered Jansen-Petrov, p. 148, in FSB 3-os.6.1.350 and FSB 3os.6.3.316. Stalin death list signed 20 Aug. 1938: APRF 3.24.417.248–53.

[22] Beria and Yezhov: Khrushchev quoted, Jansen-Petrov, p. 157. Beria, pp. 53, 87–91. Jansen-Petrov, pp. 149–57. V. A. Donskoi proposed Beria. Starkov, “Narkom Yezhov” in Getty/Manning (eds.), pp. 38–9. Voenno-Istoricheskii Zhurnal (henceforth VIZh), July 1989, Oct. 1991. Beria personal role in torture: GARF 8131.32.3289.117–18. The investigations by Rudeko into methods of interrogators, 22 Mar. 1955. V. F. Nekrazov, Beria: Konets karieri, pp. 374–5. B. S. Popov and V. G. Oppokov, “Berievshchina,” VIZh, 3, 1990, pp. 81–90.

 

[23] He usually signed documents in tiny neat writing in a distinctive turquoise ink or on a turquoise typewriter that did not clash with Stalin’s blue or red crayons.

[24] IBM or GM: Martha Peshkova. V. I. Novikov quoted in Nekrasov, Konets karieri, pp. 229–37. Romanov quoted in Sergo B, p. 245. Y. Cohen, “Des lettres comme action: Stalin au debut des années rente vu depuis les fonds Kaganovich” in Cahiers du Monde russe , vol. 38, no. 3, July–Sept. 1997, pp. 307–345. RGASPI 82.2.897.32, Beria to Molotov 26 Feb. 1940. Beria, pp. 195, 174. “Bull nerves”: interview Nikolai Baibakov. Tireless, clever: “An interview with VM Molotov,” Literaturuli Sakhartvelo, 27 Oct. 1989, in Beria, pp. 195–274.

[25] The author is grateful to Alyosha Mirtskhulava, Beria’s Georgian Komsomol boss, and later Georgian First Secretary, for his interview in Tbilisi.

[26] Kill best friend: GARF 7523.85.236.17–23, Tsanava, 24 Mar. 1955. Fear and enthusiasm: Sudoplatov, p. 186. “Idolized”—Krotkov quoted in Beria, p. 203. “Camp dust”: Beria A fair , p. 5. King: KR I, p. 125. Interview with Alyosha Mirtskhulava. Cosiness with wife, Mexican bandits: Martha Peshkova. Worshipped Stalin: Sergo B, pp. 144–5. Richardson, Long Shadow, p. 158. Clear pince-nez: Golovanov in MR, p. 343. Artyom Sergeev.

 

[27] Candide Charkviani at Beria’s when Stalin arrived: interview Gela Charkviani. Sergo B, p. 34. Mikoyan, p. 33.

[28] The case in question concerned an investigation to find the person who had mistakenly burned the books of Lenin, Stalin and Gorky in a furnace: another example of the absurdity and deadliness of the Terror.

[29] RGASPI 82.2.897.12–13, Vyshinsky to Stalin and Molotov and Molotov to Vyshinsky, n.d. Volya Malenkova. Martha Peshkova. Kira Alliluyeva. Sudoplatov, pp. 39–40. Beria, pp. 87–91. Polianski, p. 190. KR I, pp. 118–9. Jansen-Petrov, pp. 154–9.

[30] Khlevniuk, Circle, pp. 240–5. Volkogonov, p. 338.

 

[31] RGVA 9.29.390.275, Mekhlis to Stalin and Voroshilov, 23 Aug. 1938. Mekhlis, pp. 103–4, 107. Mekhlis’s role: Voprosy istorii. no. 10, 1998, p. 78. Coox, “Liushkov,” pp. 145–86. Mekhlis was accompanied by Yezhov’s deputy, Frinovsky. “Appoint commission to investigate the Lenin Academy . . . if any of the Tolmachev grouping are still there, remove them down to the last one.” Mekhlis, 5 July 1938. Volkogonov, p. 368. Mekhlis to Stalin 20 Nov. 1938, Mekhlis, p. 102; on Blyukher, p. 106. War and Blyukher: Volkogonov, p. 328. Mekhlis, p. 124. Spahr, p. 186. M. V. Zakharov, Generalnyi shtab v predvoennye gody, pp. 137–42. Kaganovich, p. 30. Roy Medvedev, “Joseph Stalin and Joseph Apanasenko: The Far Eastern Front during WW2” in Neizvestnyi Stalin.

[32] S. Fedoseev, “Favorit Yezhova,” Sovershenno Sekretno 9, 1996. Jansen-Petrov, pp. 150–6, quoting FSB 3-os.6.3.367, Frinovsky Case N-15301.2.32; Frinovsky N-15301.7.195; Dagin in FSB 3.6.3.259, 323; Evdokimov in FSB 3.6.4.403 and FSB 3.6.3.261.

 

[33] V. D. Uspenski, Tainy Sovetnik Vozhdia. Lesser Terror, pp. 4–6. Jansen-Petrov, pp. 153, 159, 166–7. Shentalinsky, “Okhota,” pp. 70–96.

[34] In this case, Stalin backed Beria’s dismissal of the case against Shipping Commissar Tevosian but told Mikoyan: “Tell him the CC knows he was recruited by Krupp as a German agent. Everyone understands a person gets trapped . . . If he confesses it honestly . . . the CC will forgive him.” Mikoyan called Tevosian into his office to offer him Stalin’s trick but the Commissar refused to confess, which Stalin accepted. Tevosian was to be one of the major industrial managers of WWII.

[35] Molotov’s face like a mask: Mikoyan, pp. 321–7. Molotov, claims to have saved Tevosian, MR, p. 294.

[36] Khlevniuk, Circle, pp. 224–30. Parrish, “Yezhov,” pp. 78–89. Sudoplatov, p. 43.

 

[37] Family tragedy of Yezhov: Jansen-Petrov, pp. 121–4; Briukhanov and Shoshkov, p. 124; Starkov, “Narkom Yezhov,” Getty/Manning (eds.), pp. 34–5. Kamov, “Smert Nikolaia Yezhova,” pp. 41–3. Vasily Grossman, Mama, pp. 8–15. Simon Uritsky’s interrogation quoted in KGB Lit. Archive, p. 56. Polianski, pp. 190–7.

 

[38] On Beria and Stalin’s plan to use Yevgenia against Yezhov: Politicheskii Dnevnik, vol. 2, Amsterdam, 1975, p. 136. Kamov, “ Smert Nikolaia Yezhova,” pp. 41–3. Yezhova to Stalin: APRF 45.1.729.96, quoted in Jansen-Petrov, pp. 166–8. Polianski, p. 190. Briukhanov and Shoshkov, pp. 122–3. KGB Lit. Archive, p. 42. Yezhova to Stalin, APRF 45.1.729.100, quoted in Jansen-Petrov, p. 169. Stalin, Kaganovich and Molotov distance themselves from Yezhov and Terror: RGASPI 17.3.1002.37. On “troikas”:Moskovskie Novosti, 21 June 1992, quoted in Getty, p. 531. RGASPI 17.3.1003.85–7.

 

[39] Her name was changed to that of Yevgenia’s first husband, Khayutin—but she remained loyal to her adoptive father into the next millennium. Natasha Yezhova survived after enduring terrible sufferings on her stepfather’s behalf. Vasily Grossman, the author of the classic novel Life and Fate, who knew the family, attending the salons with Babel and others, wrote a short story about Natasha’s tragic childhood. She became a musician in Penza and Magadan. In May 1998, she applied for Yezhov’s rehabilitation. Ironically she had a case since he was certainly not guilty of the espionage for which he was executed. Her appeal was denied. At the time of writing, she is alive.

[40] Jansen-Petrov, p. 164. IA, 1995: 5–6, p. 24. Testimony of I. Dementev in FSB 3-os-6.3.257; APRF 3.24.375.120; testimony of Yezhov in FSB 3-os.6.3.332–333; both quoted in Jansen-Petrov p. 170–2. Shentalinsky, “Okhota,” p. 179. The autopsy that described her as a “woman of 34, of medium height, well-developed physique” reveals that she died of Luminal poisoning. Parrish, “Yezhov,” p. 101. Polianski, p. 190. Beria, p. 250. Yezhov’s brother was shot. KR I, p. 115–20. Pirozhkova, p. 105.

 

[41] Jansen-Petrov, p. 164, orgies and oral sex, p. 173, God’s will, p. 174, and “plague ridden,” p. 202. Gay sex with Dementev, FSB 3-os.6.1 and 6.3. Sex with Konstantinov and wife: FSB 3-os.6.3.247–52, all quoted in Jansen-Petrov, pp. 172–3. Khlevniuk, Circle, pp. 224–30. Parrish, Yezhov, p. 89. VIZh, 2, 1993. IA 1998. Getty, pp. 528–39. RGASPI 17.3.1003.34 and 17.3.1004.11.

[42] The switch between the two secret police chiefs was seamless: on the twenty-fourth, Dmitrov, the Comintern leader, was still discussing arrests with Yezhov at his dacha, but by nighttime on the twenty-fifth, he was working on the same cases with Beria at hishouse.

[43] Parrish, “Yezhov,” Testimony of Zimin, chief of Lefortovo, and prison doctor Rozenblum in 1956, quoted in Vaksberg, Vyshinsky, p. 118. Working with Beria and Yezhov: Dmitrov diary, 24/25 Nov. 1938. Beria personally arrested the head of Komsomol, A. V. Kosarev, on 29 November, an act of vengeance for insults. Mgeladze, pp. 168–73: Mgeladze told Stalin the full story of Beria’s vindictive destruction of Kosarev after the war. Yet the Kosarev Case had been bubbling for some time: see RGASPI 558.11.725.160, Gorshenin to Stalin 13 July 1937. Larina, pp. 186–200. On Beria’s men: Beria, pp. 90–4. Sergo B, pp. 179–80. Interviews Martha Peshkova, Gela Charkviani, Eka Rapava, Maya Kavtaradze, Nina Rukhadze, Nadya Dekanozova, Alyosha Mirtskhulava, Nikita Petrov. On Kobulov’s shame: Elena Durden-Smith. See also: Lesser Terror; Parrish, “Yezhov”; Petrov and Scorkin.

[44] Anna Larina spent twenty years in the camps. Her son Yury was eleven months old when she was arrested in 1937 and she did not see him again until 1956, just one of many heart-breaking stories.

 

[45] Nadezhda Vlasik. Natalya Poskrebysheva. Parrish, “Yezhov,” p. 86. Petrov and Scorkin. KR I, pp. 294–5. Artyom Sergeev. Svetlana OOY, p. 333. Vlasik, pp. 24–45.

 

[46] Richardson, Long Shadow, p. 154. PB contempt for Alliluyev women: Natalya Andreyeva. Vlasik’s irritation with Anna Redens’s constant complaints about laundry: Nadezhda Vlasik. Poskrebyshev treated us like poor relations: Kira Alliluyeva. Richardson, Long Shadow, p. 156. Bronka groped by Beria: Natalya Poskrebysheva. Zhenya mocks Beria’s flirtations: Svetlana OOY, p. 323.

 

[47] Redens and slave labour: Yagoda, pp. 41, 382–90. Agranov’s speech at 1937 Plenum in Getty, p. 430. Banning beating? Leonid Redens and Vladimir Alliluyev (Redens). Petrov and Scorkin.

[48] The other three generals who signed the letter were, apparently, Stalin’s Tsaritsyn crony, Grigory Kulik, and Commanders Meretskov and D. Pavlov. Commissar Savchenko also signed. Savchenko was executed in October 1941; the fates of the others are told later in this book. All suffered grievously at Stalin’s hands. Only Meretskov out-lived him.

[49] Vladimir Alliluyev (Redens). Kira Alliluyeva. Svetlana RR, p. 144. Orlov, p. 309. Pavel’s medical: RGASPI 558.11.1551.43. The story of the letter of protest against the Terror based on confession before execution of General D. Pavlov: see Miklos Kun,Stalin: An Unknown Portrait, pp. 427–9.

 

[50] Svetlana, Twenty Letters, pp. 66–7. Beria and Malenkov propose Redens’s arrest: Vasily Stalin to Vladimir Alliluyev (Redens). Redens’s involvement in plot against Beria 1931: RGASPI 558.11.801.42–3, Redens to Stalin. Redens replaced by Balitsky, Aug. 1932: Kaganovich Perepiska, pp. 273–5. Yezhov on Poles, Chase, Enemies, pp. 234–5, 239, 265. Richardson, Long Shadow, p. 150, Mikoyan, p. 59. Vladimir Alliluyev (Redens). Leonid Redens.

[51] His old lover of 1913, “my darling” Tatiana Slavotinskaya, is an example: Stalin had protected her well into the thirties, promoting her in the Central Committee apparatus, but now the protection stopped abruptly. Her family was repressed and she was expelled from the House on the Embankment. Slavotinskaya was the grandmother of Yury Trifonov, author of the novel House on the Embankment.

[51] Nakashidze: Sergo Mikoyan. Martha Peshkova. Leonid Redens. Svetlana, Twenty Letters, pp. 135–7. Marriage for Stalin: Volkogonov, p. 155.

 

[52] Stalin and Dmitrov: Sovershenno Sekretno, 3, 2000. “I’m not Stalin”: Artyom Sergeev. Slavotinskaya’s later career: Miklos Kun, Stalin: An Unknown Portrait, p. 46.

 

[53] Nakashidze: Sergo Mikoyan. Martha Peshkova. Leonid Redens. Svetlana, Twenty Letters, pp. 135–7. Marriage for Stalin: Volkogonov, p. 155.

 

[54] Kira Alliluyeva. Kostyrchenko, p. 80.

[55] Stalin appreciative of well-dressed women, flirtations: Kira Alliluyeva, Leonid Redens. Svanidze diary. Stalin’s types, Schpiller and Davydova. Svetlana OOY, p. 329. Vasilieva, Kremlin Wives, pp. 74–6. Galina , p. 95. MR, p. 174. Maya Plisetskaya and Tim Schott, I, Maya (henceforth Maya), p. 81. Davydova’s belt: Rybin, Ryadom so Stalinym v Bolshom Teatre, pp. 32–3, 67–9. Stalin nicknamed his favourite ballerina, Lepeshinskaya, “the Dragonfly.” “Joseph Vissarionovich, did I dance well?” the “Dragonfly” asked Stalin. “You whirled well,” he would reply, “but Asaf Messerer was better than you!” His favourite actress at the Moscow Arts Theatre was Alla Tarasova.

 

[56] She remained a presence in the household until after the end of the war when she married an NKVD general and returned to Georgia where she had children. Her daughter still lives in Georgia.

 

[57] President Vladimir Putin’s grandfather was a chef at one of Stalin’s houses and revealed nothing to his grandson: “My grandfather kept pretty quiet about his past life.” As a boy, he recalled bringing food to Rasputin. He then cooked for Lenin. He was clearly Russia’s most world-historical chef since he served Lenin, Stalin and the Mad Monk.

[58] Stalin’s bodyguards, whose inconsistent but revealing memoirs were collected long after his death, were not sure about the Valechka relationship. When she became older, she married and, during Stalin’s later years, she complained of her husband’s jealous reproaches. After Stalin’s death, Valechka never spoke of their relationship but when she was asked if the opera singer Davydova ever visited Kuntsevo, her answer perhaps displayed a proprietorial sting: “I never saw her at the dacha . . . She’d have been thrown out!” Valechka was not a Party member.

[59] Rusudana Zhordaniya: Rybin, Oktyabre 1941, p. 18. Interview with Alyosha Mirtskhulava: he knew Rusudana well and ridiculed the idea of an affair: “She was so much younger than him,” he told the author. He also saw nothing suspicious about Stalin’s invitation via himself to the Georgian girl. Dancing: Kozlovsky in Karpov, Rastrelyanniye Marshaly, p. 342. Women with ideas: Svetlana, OOY, p. 329. MR, p. 174. Kaganovich, pp. 160–2. Kuzakova in Radzinsky, p. 65. Istomina denies Davydova: Rybin, Stalin i Zhukov, p. 63. Chatterbox, comfortable soul: Lozgachev in Radzinsky, p. 560. Father’s creature comforts: Richardson, Long Shadow, p. 248. Artyom Sergeev. Martha Peshkova. Kira Alliluyeva. On confidentiality of service staff: conversation with Roy Medvedev. One common-law wife: Kaganovich’s daughter-in-law: Vasilieva, Kremlevskie Zheny, p. 372. Jealousy of Valechka’s husband: Rybin, Oktyabre 1941, p. 18. Vladimir Putin, First Person, p. 3; also Oleg Blotsky, Vladimir Putin: The Story of My Life. “Nobody’s business/Engels” housekeeper: MR, p. 208. In apron like nurse: Popovich quoted in Dedijer, Tito Speaks, p. 282. Stalin’s love of discretion: Berman in Oni, p. 236. Valechka at Yalta and Potsdam: Volkogonov, p. 574. Stalin’s pride in his underwear drawer: Charkviani, p. 35. “Of course it was known she was his wife”: Poskrebyshev’s daughter Natalya.

 

[60] Vyshinsky reported that the arrest of hundreds of teenagers in Novosibirsk had been faked by the NKVD: “the children were innocent and have been released but three senior officials including the head of the NKVD and the town Procurator were guilty of ‘betraying revolutionary loyalty’ and expelled from the Party.” What should be done with them? On 2 January 1939, Stalin scribbled: “It’s necessary to have a public trial of the guilty.”

[61] Stalin stops the Terror: Volkogonov, pp. 337, 344. Beria moved into Chubar’s dacha: Beria, p. 98. Svetlana OOY, p. 355. RGASPI 558.11.773.101, Mekhlis to Stalin and reply 6 Nov. 1939. Vyshinsky, for example, wrote to complain that the NKVD had arrested officials without the Procurator’s warrant. It would be naïve to say that legality was reasserting itself; it was merely that the illusion was replacing a frenzied witch hunt. RGASPI 82.2.897.28, Vyshinsky to Stalin/Molotov 31 Mar. 1939. We can follow the complex wranglings between Vyshinsky and the NKVD with Malenkov trying to restore some order between them: RGASPI 588.2.155.39.60. Stalin, Khrulev and Mekhlis, Kumanev (ed.), p. 343. Children’s case of Novosibirsk: RGASPI 588.2.155.65, Vyshinsky to Stalin and reply 2 Jan. 1939. We can see the working of the leadership and the practice of absolute dictatorship in this example of relaxation. When Molotov suggested, after some prompting from Vyshinsky, that non-political female prisoners, who had committed the grievous crime in this slave-labour state of leaving work during the day, should be freed, Molotov agreed but Stalin personally specified: “I’m opposed. I think it would be right if such women paid a fine instead of prison of one month’s salary and it must be done thus; 25% of their salary must be deducted for four months. Stalin.” This became law three days later: RGASPI 588.2.1551.27–33, Vyshinsky to Molotov to Stalin 23–26 Aug. 1940. Nikolaenko: RGASPI 558.11.132.141–5, P. T. Nikolaenko to Stalin and Khrushchev 20 Feb. 1939, and Stalin to Khrushchev. Trotsky: Sudoplatov, p. 66.

[62] In the ugly wooden chamber that had been created by vandalizing the sumptuous Alexandrovsky Hall in the Great Kremlin Palace.

[63] This blackmail against Malenkov, accusing him of noble connections, may have formed part of the basis of his alliance with Beria though Stalin knew of the evidence. “Think yourself lucky these documents are in my hands,” Beria told him. When Beria was arrested in June 1953, after Stalin’s death, these papers were given to Malenkov who destroyed them.

[64] On 5 February 1939, that shrewd observer of power, Svetlana Stalin, aged thirteen, listed the survivors of the Terror in a note: “1. To Stalin. 2. Voroshilov. 3. Zhdanov. 4. Molotov. 5. Kaganovich. 6. Khrushchev. Daily Order No. 8. I’m travelling to Zubalovo . . . leaving you on your own. Hold on to your bellies with an iron hand! Setanka, Mistress of the house.” The grandees each replied revealingly: “I obey. Stalin, the poor peasant. L. Kaganovich. The obedient Voroshilov. The diligent escapee Ukrainian N. Khrushchev. V. Molotov.”

[65] Tucker, Power, pp. 586/9. Lesser Terror, pp. 31–2. Kuznetsov tells how Frinovsky was casually sacked by Stalin and replaced by him, Bialer (ed.), p. 92. Khlevniuk, Circle, pp. 260–6. Beria, p. 94. Yezhov’s arrest before and after: Yezhov to Stalin in APRF 45.1.20.53 quoted in Jansen-Petrov, p. 178. Darts at Water Transport: Medvedev, p. 458–60. Conquest, Stalin: Breaker of Nations, pp. 208–9. N. G. Kuznetsov, “Krutiye povoroty: iz zapisok admirala,” VIZh, 7, 1993, p. 50. N. P. Dudorov, Interior Minister in 1957, told the CC Plenum that Beria had interrogated Yezhov especially about Malenkov producing 20 pages of evidence against him, Jansen-Petrov, p. 158. Sudoplatov, p. 63. Parrish, “Yezhov,” p. 90. Polianski, pp. 216–7. D. Likhanov and V. Nikonov, “Ya pochistil OGPU” in Sovershenno Sekretno , 4, 1992. Jansen-Petrov, pp. 176, 182, quoting Piliatskin, Vrag Naroda , and APRF 57.1.287.7–18. “Think yourself lucky . . .” Sergo B, p. 161. Explanatory note of D. Sukhanov on loss of testimony of N. I. Yezhov against G. M. Malenkov, 21 May 1956, in O. Khlevniuk, I. Gorlitsky, L. P. Kosheleva, A. I. Miniuk, M. Y. Prozymenshikov, L. A. Rogovaya, S. V. Somonova, Politburo TsK BKP i Soviet Ministrov SSSR 1945/1953, p. 203 (henceforth PB/Sov-Min). Svetlana note: RGASPI 558.1.5160.