Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  Stalin, assisted by Molotov, forty-two, and his economics chief, Valerian Kuibyshev, forty-five, who looked like a mad poet, with wild hair, an enthusiasm for drink, women and, appropriately, writing poetry, ordered the arrest of those who opposed them. The stress of those months was stifling as Stalin feared losing the Ukraine itself which, in parts, had descended into a dystopia of starvation and disorder. When Yagoda left at 7:05 p.m., the others stayed talking about their war to “break the back” of the peasantry, whatever the cost to the millions starving in history’s greatest man-made famine. They were determined to use the grain to finance their gargantuan push to make Russia a modern industrial power. But that night, the tragedy would be closer to home: Stalin was to face a personal crisis that was the most wounding and mysterious of his career. He would replay it over and over again for the rest of his days.

  At 8:05 p.m., Stalin, accompanied by the others, ambled down the steps towards the party, through the snowy alleyways and squares of that red-walled medieval fortress, dressed in his Party tunic, baggy old trousers, soft leather boots, old army greatcoat and his wolf shapka with earmuffs. His left arm was slightly shorter than the other but much less noticeable than it became in old age—and he was usually smoking a cigarette or puffing on his pipe. The head and the thick, low hair, still black but with specks of the first grey, radiated the graceful strength of the mountain men of the Caucasus; his almost Oriental, feline eyes were “honey-coloured” but flashed a lupine yellow in anger. Children found his moustache prickly and his smell of tobacco acrid, but as Molotov and his female admirers recalled, Stalin was still attractive to women with whom he flirted shyly and clumsily.1

  This small, sturdy figure, five feet, six inches tall, who walked ponderously yet briskly with a rough pigeon-toed gait (which was studiously aped by Bolshoi actors when they were playing Tsars), chatting softly to Molotov in his heavy Georgian accent, was only protected by one or two guards. The magnates strolled around Moscow with hardly any security. Even the suspicious Stalin, who was already hated in the countryside, walked home from his Old Square office with just one bodyguard. Molotov and Stalin were walking home one night in a snowstorm “with no bodyguards” through the Manege Square when they were approached by a beggar. Stalin gave him ten roubles and the disappointed tramp shouted: “You damned bourgeois!”

  “Who can understand our people?” mused Stalin. Despite assassinations of Soviet officials (including an attempt on Lenin in 1918), things were remarkably relaxed until the June 1927 assassination of the Soviet Ambassador to Poland, when there was a slight tightening of security. In 1930, the Politburo passed a decree “to ban Comrade Stalin from walking around town on foot.” Yet he continued his strolling for a few more years. This was a golden age which, in just a few hours, was to end in death, if not murder.2

  Stalin was already famous for his Sphinxian inscrutability, and phlegmatic modesty, represented by the pipe he ostentatiously puffed like a peasant elder. Far from being the colourless bureaucratic mediocrity disdained by Trotsky, the real Stalin was an energetic and vainglorious melodramatist who was exceptional in every way.

  Beneath the eerie calm of these unfathomable waters were deadly whirlpools of ambition, anger and unhappiness. Capable both of moving with controlled gradualism and of reckless gambles, he seemed enclosed inside a cold suit of steely armour but his antennae were intensely sensitive and his fiery Georgian temper was so uncontrollable that he had almost ruined his career by unleashing it against Lenin’s wife. He was a mercurial neurotic with the tense, seething temperament of a highly strung actor who revels in his own drama—what his ultimate successor, Nikita Khrushchev, called a litsedei, a man of many faces. Lazar Kaganovich, one of his closest comrades for over thirty years who was also on his way to the dinner, left the best description of this “unique character”: he was a “different man at different times . . . I knew no less than five or six Stalins.”

  However, the opening of his archives, and many newly available sources, illuminate him more than ever before: it is no longer enough to describe him as an “enigma.” We now know how he talked (constantly about himself, often with revealing honesty), how he wrote notes and letters, what he ate, sang and read. Placed in the context of the fissiparous Bolshevik leadership, a unique environment, he becomes a real person. The man inside was a super-intelligent and gifted politician for whom his own historic role was paramount, a nervy intellectual who manically read history and literature, and a fidgety hypochondriac suffering from chronic tonsillitis, psoriasis, rheumatic aches from his deformed arm and the iciness of his Siberian exile. Garrulous, sociable and a fine singer, this lonely and unhappy man ruined every love relationship and friendship in his life by sacrificing happiness to political necessity and cannibalistic paranoia. Damaged by his childhood and abnormally cold in temperament, he tried to be a loving father and husband yet poisoned every emotional well, this nostalgic lover of roses and mimosas who believed the solution to every human problem was death, and who was obsessed with executions. This atheist owed everything to priests and saw the world in terms of sin and repentance, yet he was a “convinced Marxist fanatic from his youth.” His fanaticism was “semi-Islamic,” his Messianic egotism boundless. He assumed the imperial mission of the Russians yet remained very much a Georgian, bringing the vendettas of his forefathers northwards to Muscovy.

  Most public men share the Caesarian habit of detaching themselves to admire their own figures on the world stage, but Stalin’s detachment was a degree greater. His adopted son Artyom Sergeev remembers Stalin shouting at his son Vasily for exploiting his father’s name. “But I’m a Stalin too,” said Vasily.

  “No, you’re not,” replied Stalin. “You’re not Stalin and I’m not Stalin. Stalin IS Soviet power. Stalin is what he is in the newspapers and the portraits, not you, no not even me!”

  He was a self-creation. A man who invents his name, birthday, nationality, education and his entire past, in order to change history and play the role of leader, is likely to end up in a mental institution, unless he embraces, by will, luck and skill, the movement and the moment that can overturn the natural order of things. Stalin was such a man. The movement was the Bolshevik Party; his moment, the decay of the Russian monarchy. After Stalin’s death, it was fashionable to regard him as an aberration but this was to rewrite history as crudely as Stalin did himself. Stalin’s success was not an accident. No one alive was more suited to the conspiratorial intrigues, theoretical runes, murderous dogmatism and inhuman sternness of Lenin’s Party. It is hard to find a better synthesis between a man and a movement than the ideal marriage between Stalin and Bolshevism: he was a mirror of its virtues and faults.3

  Nadya was excited because she was dressing up. Only the day before at the Revolution Day parade, her headaches had been agonizing but today she was cheerful. Just as the real Stalin was different from his historical persona, so was the real Nadezhda Alliluyeva. “She was very beautiful but you can’t see it in photographs,” recalls Artyom Sergeev. She was not conventionally pretty. When she smiled, her eyes radiated honesty and sincerity but she was also po-faced, aloof and troubled by mental and physical illnesses. Her coldness was periodically shattered by attacks of hysteria and depression. She was chronically jealous. Unlike Stalin, who had a hangman’s wit, no one recalls Nadya’s sense of humour. She was a Bolshevik, quite capable of acting as Stalin’s snitch, denouncing enemies to him. So was this the marriage of an ogre and a lamb, a metaphor for Stalin’s treatment of Russia itself ? Only insomuch as it was a Bolshevik marriage in every sense, typical of the peculiar culture that spawned it. Yet in another way, this is simply the commonplace tragedy of a callous workaholic who could not have been a worse partner for his self-centred and unbalanced wife.

  Stalin’s life appeared to be a perfect fusion of Bolshevik politics and family. Despite the brutal war on the peasants and the increasing pressure on the leaders, this time was a happy idyll, a life of country weekends at peaceful dachas, chee
rful dinners in the Kremlin, and languid warm holidays on the Black Sea that Stalin’s children would remember as the happiest of their lives.

  Stalin’s letters reveal a difficult but loving marriage: “Hello, Tatka . . . I miss you so much Tatochka—I’m as lonely as a horned owl,” Stalin wrote to Nadya, using his affectionate nickname for her, on 21 June 1930. “I’m not going out of town on business. I’m just finishing up my work and then I’m going out of town to the children tomorrow . . . So goodbye, don’t be too long, come home sooner! My kisses! Your Joseph.” 4

  Nadya was away taking treatment for her headaches in Carlsbad, Germany. Stalin missed her and was keeping an eye on the children, like any other husband. On another occasion, she finished her letter: “I ask you so much to look after yourself! I am kissing you passionately just as you kissed me when we were saying goodbye! Your Nadya.”5

  It was never an easy relationship. They were both passionate and thin-skinned: their rows were always dramatic. In 1926, she took the children to Leningrad, saying she was leaving him. But he begged her to return and she did. One feels these sorts of rows were frequent but there were intervals of a kind of happiness, though cosiness was too much to hope for in such a Bolshevik household. Stalin was often aggressive and insulting but it was probably his detachment that made him hardest to live with. Nadya was proud and severe but always ailing. If his comrades like Molotov and Kaganovich thought her on the verge of “madness,” her own family admitted that she was “sometimes crazed and oversensitive, all the Alliluyevs had unstable Gypsy blood.” The couple were similarly impossible. Both were selfish, cold with fiery tempers, though she had none of his cruelty and duplicity. Perhaps they were too similar to be happy. All the witnesses agree that life with Stalin was “not easy—it was a hard life.” It was “not a perfect marriage,” Polina Molotova told the Stalins’ daughter Svetlana, “but then what marriage is?”6

  After 1929, they were often apart since Stalin holidayed in the south during the autumn when Nadya was still studying. Yet the happy times were warm and loving: their letters fly back and forth with secret-police couriers and the notes follow each other in such quick succession that they resemble e-mails. Even among these ascetic Bolsheviks, there were hints of sex: the “very passionate kisses” she recalled in her letter quoted above. They loved each other’s company: as we have seen, he missed her bitterly when she was away and she missed him too. “It’s very boring without you,” she wrote. “Come up here and it’ll be nice together.” 7

  They shared Vasily and Svetlana. “Write anything about the children,” wrote Stalin from the Black Sea. When she was away, he reported: “The children are good. I don’t like the teacher, she’s running round the place and she lets Vasya and Tolika [their adopted son, Artyom] rush around morning till night. I’m sure Vaska’s studies will fail and I want them to succeed in German.” She often enclosed Svetlana’s childish notes.8 They shared their health worries like any couple. When Stalin was taking the cure at the Matsesta Baths near Sochi, he reported to her: “I’ve had two baths and I will have ten . . . I think we’ll be seriously better.”

  “How’s your health?” she inquired.

  “Had an echo on my lungs and a cough,” he replied. His teeth were a perennial problem: “Your teeth—please have them treated,” she told him. When she took a cure in Carlsbad, he asked caringly: “Did you visit the doctors—write their opinions!” He missed her but if the treatment took longer, he understood.9

  Stalin did not like changing his clothes and wore summer suits into winter so she always worried about him: “I send you a greatcoat because after the south, you might get a cold.”10 He sent her presents too: “I’m sending you some lemons,” he wrote proudly. “You’ll like them.” This keen gardener was to enjoy growing lemons until his death.11

  They gossiped about the friends and comrades they saw: “I heard Gorky [the famous novelist] came to Sochi,” she wrote. “Maybe he’s visiting you—what a pity without me. He’s so charming to listen to . . .”12 And of course, as a Bolshevik handmaiden living in that minuscule wider family of magnates and their wives, she was almost as obsessed about politics as he was, passing on what Molotov or Voroshilov told her.13 She sent him books and he thanked her but grumbled when one was missing. She teased him about his appearances in White émigré literature.

  The austerely modest Nadya was not afraid of giving orders herself. She scolded her husband’s saturnine chef de cabinet Poskrebyshev while on holiday, complaining that “we didn’t receive any new foreign literature. But they say there are some new ones. Maybe you will talk to Yagoda [Deputy GPU boss]... Last time we received such uninteresting books...” 14 When she returned from the vacation, she sent Stalin the photographs: “Only the good ones—doesn’t Molotov look funny?” He later teased the absurdly stolid Molotov in front of Churchill and Roosevelt. He sent her back his own holiday photographs.15

  However, by the late twenties, Nadya was professionally discontented. She wanted to be a serious Bolshevik career woman in her own right. In the early twenties, she had done typing for her husband, then Lenin and then for Sergo Ordzhonikidze, another energetic and passionate Georgian dynamo now responsible for Heavy Industry. Then she moved to the International Agrarian Institute in the Department of Agitation and Propaganda where, lost in the archives, we find the daily work of Stalin’s wife in all its Bolshevik dreariness: her boss asks his ordinary assistant, who signs herself “N. Alliluyeva,” to arrange the publication of a shockingly tedious article entitled “We Must Study the Youth Movement in the Village.”

  “I have absolutely nothing to do with anyone in Moscow,” she grumbled. “It’s strange, though I feel closer to non-Party people—women of course. The reason is they’re more easygoing . . . There are a terrible lot of new prejudices. If you don’t work, you’re just a baba!”2 She was right. The new Bolshevik women such as Polina Molotova were politicians in their own right. These feminists scorned housewives and typists like Nadya. But Stalin did not want such a wife for himself: his Nadya would be what he called a “baba.” 16 In 1929, Nadya decided to become a powerful Party woman in her own right and did not go on holiday with her husband but remained in Moscow for her examinations to enter the Industrial Academy to study synthetic fibres, hence her loving correspondence with Stalin. Education was one of the great Bolshevik achievements and there were millions like her. Stalin really wanted a baba but he supported her enterprise: ironically, his instincts may have been right, because it became clear that she was really not strong enough to be a student, mother and Stalin’s wife simultaneously. He often signed off: “How are the exams? Kiss my Tatka!” Molotov’s wife became a People’s Commissar—and there was every reason for Nadya to hope she would do the same.17

  Across the Kremlin, the magnates and their wives converged on Voroshilov’s apartment, oblivious of the tragedy about to befall Stalin and Nadya. None of them had far to come. Ever since Lenin had moved the capital to Moscow in 1918, the leaders had lived in this isolated secret world, behind walls thirteen feet thick, crenellated burgundy battlements and towering fortified gates, which, more than anything, resembled a 64-acre theme park of the history of old Muscovy. “Here Ivan the Terrible used to walk,” Stalin told visitors. He daily passed the Archangel Cathedral where Ivan the Terrible lay buried, the Ivan the Great Tower, and the Yellow Palace, where he worked, had been built for Catherine the Great: by 1932, Stalin had lived fourteen years in the Kremlin, as long as he had in his parental home.

  These potentates—the “responsible workers” in Bolshevik terminology—and their staff, the “service workers,” lived in high-ceilinged, roomy apartments once occupied by Tsarist governors and major-domos, mainly in the Poteshny3 or Horse Guards, existing so closely in these spired and domed courtyards that they resembled dons living in an Oxford college: Stalin was always popping in to their homes and the other leaders regularly turned up at his place for a chat, almost to borrow the proverbial cup of sugar.

 
Most of the guests only needed to walk along the corridor to get to the second-floor apartment of Kliment Voroshilov and his wife Ekaterina in the Horse Guards (nominally the Red Guards Building, but no one called it that). Their home was reached through a door in the archway that contained the little cinema where Stalin and his friends often decamped after dinner. Inside, it was cosy but spacious, with dark wood-panelled rooms looking out over the Kremlin walls into the city. Voroshilov, their host, aged fifty-two, was the most popular hero in the Bolshevik pantheon— a genial and swaggering cavalryman, once a lathe turner, with an elegant, almost d’Artagnanish moustache, fair hair and a cherubic rosy-cheeked face. Stalin would have arrived with the priggish Molotov and the debauched Kuibyshev. Molotov’s wife, the dark and formidable Polina, always finely dressed, came from her own flat in the same building. Nadya crossed the lane from the Poteshny with her sister Anna.

  In 1932, there would have been no shortage of food and drink, but these were the days before Stalin’s dinners became imperial banquets. The food—Russian hors d’oeuvres, soup, various dishes of salted fish and maybe some lamb—was cooked in the Kremlin canteen and brought hot up to the flat, where it was served by a housekeeper and washed down with vodka and Georgian wine in a parade of toasts. Faced with unparalleled disaster in the regions where ten million people were starving, conspiracy in his Party, uncertain of the loyalty of his own entourage—and with the added strain of a troubled wife, Stalin felt beleaguered and at war. Like the others at the centre of this whirlwind, he needed to drink and unwind. Stalin sat in the middle of the table, never at the head, and Nadya sat opposite him.

  During the week, the Stalin household was based in the Kremlin apartment. The Stalins had two children, Vasily, eleven, a diminutive, stubborn and nervous boy, and Svetlana, seven, a freckly red-haired girl. Then there was Yakov, now twenty-five, son of Stalin’s first marriage, who had joined his father in 1921, having been brought up in Georgia, a shy, dark boy with handsome eyes. Stalin found Yakov irritatingly slow. When he was eighteen, he had fallen in love with, and married, Zoya, a priest’s daughter. Stalin did not approve, because he wanted Yasha to study. In a “cry for help,” Yasha shot himself but only grazed his chest. Stalin regarded this “as blackmail.” The stern Nadya disapproved of Yasha’s self-indulgence: “she was so appalled by Yasha,” Stalin mused. But he was even less sympathetic.