Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  Nadya looked at one of the many presents that her genial brother Pavel had brought back from Berlin along with the black embroidered dress she was still wearing. This was a present she had requested because, as she told her brother, “sometimes it’s so scary and lonely in the Kremlin with just one soldier on duty.” It was an exquisite lady’s pistol in an elegant leather holster. This is always described as a Walther but in fact it was a Mauser. It is little known that Pavel also brought an identical pistol as a present for Polina Molotova but pistols were not hard to come by in that circle.

  Whenever Stalin came home, he did not check his wife but simply went to bed in his own bedroom on the other side of the apartment.

  Some say Nadya bolted the bedroom door. She began to write a letter to Stalin, “a terrible letter,” thought her daughter Svetlana. In the small hours, somewhere between 2 and 3 a.m. when she had finished it, she lay on the bed.

  The household rose as normal. Stalin always lay in until about eleven. No one knew when he had come home and whether he had encountered Nadya. It was late when Carolina Til tried Nadya’s door and perhaps forced it open. “Shaking with fright,” she found her mistress’s body on the floor by the bed in a pool of blood. The pistol was beside her. She was already cold. The housekeeper rushed to get the nanny. They returned and laid the body on the bed before debating what to do. Why did they not waken Stalin? “Little people” have a very reasonable aversion to breaking bad news to their Tsars. “Faint with fear,” they telephoned the security boss, Pauker, then “Uncle Abel” Yenukidze, Nadya’s last dancing partner, the politician in charge of the Kremlin, and Polina Molotova, the last person to see her alive. Yenukidze, who lived in Horse Guards like the others, arrived first—he alone of the leaders viewed the pristine scene, knowledge for which he would pay dearly. Molotov and Voroshilov arrived minutes later.

  One can only imagine the frantic uproar in the apartment as the oblivious ruler of Russia slept off his drink down one corridor while his wife slept eternally down the other. They also called Nadya’s family—her brother Pavel, who lived across the river in the new House on the Embankment, and parents, Sergei and Olga Alliluyev. Someone called the family’s personal doctor who in turn summoned the well-known Professor Kushner.

  Peering at her later, this disparate group of magnates, family and servants, searching for reasons for this act of despair and betrayal, found the angry letter she left behind. No one knows what it contained—or whether it was destroyed by Stalin or someone else. But Stalin’s bodyguard, Vlasik, later revealed that something else was found in her bedroom: a copy of the damaging anti-Stalinist “Platform,” written by Riutin, an Old Bolshevik who was now under arrest. This might be significant or it might mean nothing. All the leaders then read opposition and émigré journals so perhaps Nadya was reading Stalin’s copy. In her letters to Stalin, she reported what she had read in the White press “about YOU! Are you interested?” Nonetheless, during those days in the country at large, the mere possession of this document warranted arrest.

  No one knew what to do. They gathered in the dining room, whispering: should they wake up Stalin? Who would tell the Vozhd ? How had she died? Suddenly Stalin himself walked into the room. Someone, most likely it was Yenukidze, Stalin’s old friend who, judging by the archives, had assumed responsibility, stepped forward and said: “Joseph, Nadezhda Sergeevna is no longer with us. Joseph, Joseph, Nadya’s dead.” 22

  Stalin was poleaxed. This supremely political creature, with an inhuman disregard for the millions of starving women and children in his own country, displayed more humanity in the next few days than he would at any other time in his life. Olga, Nadya’s mother, an elegant lady of independent spirit who had known Stalin so long and always regretted her daughter’s behaviour, hurried into the dining room where a broken Stalin was still absorbing the news. Doctors had arrived and they offered the heartbroken mother some valerian drops, the valium of the thirties, but she could not drink them. Stalin staggered towards her: “I’ll drink them,” he said. He downed the whole dose. He saw the body and the letter which, wrote Svetlana, shocked and wounded him grievously.

  Nadya’s brother, Pavel, arrived with his dimpled sunny wife Yevgenia, known to all as Zhenya, who would herself play a secret role in Stalin’s life—and suffer for it. They were alarmed not only by the death of a sister but by the sight of Stalin himself.

  “She’s crippled me,” he said. They had never seen him so soft, so vulnerable. He wept, saying something like this lament of many years later: “Oh Nadya, Nadya . . . how we needed you, me and the children!” The rumours of murder started immediately. Had Stalin returned to the apartment and shot her in a row? Or had he insulted her again and gone to bed, leaving her to kill herself ? But the tragedy raised greater questions too: until that night, the existence of the magnates was a “wonderful life,” as described by Ekaterina Voroshilova in her diary. That night, it ended forever. “How,” she asks, “did our life in the Party become so complex, that it was incomprehensible to the point of agony?” The “agony” was just beginning. The suicide “altered history,” claims the Stalins’ nephew, Leonid Redens. “It made the Terror inevitable.” Naturally Nadya’s family exaggerate the significance of her death: Stalin’s vindictive, paranoid and damaged character was already formed long before. The Terror itself was the result of vast political, economic and diplomatic forces—but Stalin’s personality certainly shaped it. Nadya’s death created one of the rare moments of doubt in a life of iron self-belief and dogmatic certainty. How did Stalin recover and what was the effect of this humiliation on him, his entourage—and Russia itself? Did vengeance for this personal fiasco play its part in the coming Terror when some of the guests that night would liquidate the others?

  Stalin suddenly picked up Nadya’s pistol and weighed it in his hands: “It was a toy,” he told Molotov, adding strangely, “It was only fired once a year!”

  The man of steel “was in a shambles, knocked sideways,” exploding in “sporadic fits of rage,” blaming anyone else, even the books she was reading, before subsiding into despair. Then he declared that he resigned from power. He too was going to kill himself: “I can’t go on living like this . . .”23

  PART ONE

  That Wonderful Time: Stalin and Nadya 1878–1932

  1

  The Georgian and the Schoolgirl

  Nadya and Stalin had been married for fourteen years but it extended deeper and longer than that, so steeped was their marriage in Bolshevism. They had shared the formative experiences of the underground life and intimacy with Lenin during the Revolution, then the Civil War. Stalin had known her family for nearly thirty years and he had first met her in 1904 when she was three. He was then twenty-five and he had been a Marxist for six years.

  Joseph Vissarionovich Djugashvili was not born on 21 December 1879, Stalin’s official birthday. “Soso” was actually born in a tiny shack (that still exists) to Vissarion, or “Beso,” and his wife Ekaterina, “Keke,” née Geladze, over a year earlier on 6 December 1878. They lived in Gori, a small town beside the Kura River in the romantic, mountainous and defiantly un-Russian province of Georgia, a small country thousands of miles from the Tsar’s capital: it was closer to Baghdad than St. Petersburg.7 Westerners often do not realize how foreign Georgia was: an independent kingdom for millennia with its own ancient language, traditions, cuisine, literature, it was only consumed by Russia in gulps between 1801 and 1878. With its sunny climate, clannish blood feuds, songs and vineyards, it resembles Sicily more than Siberia.

  Soso’s father was a violent, drunken semi-itinerant cobbler who savagely beat both Soso and Keke. She in turn, as the child later recalled, “thrashed him mercilessly.” Soso once threw a dagger at his father. Stalin reminisced how Beso and Father Charkviani, the local priest, indulged in drinking bouts together to the fury of his mother: “Father, don’t make my husband a drunk, it’ll destroy my family.” Keke threw out Beso. Stalin was proud of her “strong willpower.”
When Beso later forcibly took Soso to work as a cobbling apprentice in Tiflis, Keke’s priests helped get him back.

  Stalin’s mother took in washing for local merchants. She was pious and became close to the priests who protected her. But she was also earthy and spicy: she may have made the sort of compromises that are tempting for a penniless single mother, becoming the mistress of her employers. This inspired the legends that often embroider the paternity of famous men. It is possible that Stalin was the child of his godfather, an affluent innkeeper, officer and amateur wrestler named Koba Egnatashvili. Afterwards, Stalin protected Egnatashvili’s two sons, who remained friends until his death and reminisced in old age about Egnatashvili’s wrestling prowess. Nonetheless, one sometimes has to admit that great men are the children of their own fathers. Stalin was said to resemble Beso uncannily. Yet he himself once asserted that his father was a priest.

  Stalin was born with the second and third toes of his left foot joined. He suffered a pock-marked face from an attack of smallpox and later damaged his left arm, possibly in a carriage accident. He grew up into a sallow, stocky, surly youth with speckled honey-coloured eyes and thick black hair— a kinto, Georgian street urchin. He was exceptionally intelligent with an ambitious mother who wanted him to be a priest, perhaps like his real father. Stalin later boasted that he learned to read at five by listening to Father Charkviani teaching the alphabet. The five-year-old then helped Charkviani’s thirteen-year-old daughter with her reading.

  In 1888, he entered the Gori Church School and then, triumphantly, in 1894, won a “five rouble scholarship” to the Tiflis Seminary in the Georgian capital. As Stalin later told a confidant, “My father found out that along with the scholarship, I also earned money (five roubles a month) as a choirboy . . . and once I went out and saw him standing there: “ ‘Young man, sir,’ said Beso, ‘you’ve forgotten your father . . . Give me at least three roubles, don’t be as mean as your mother!’

  “ ‘Don’t shout!’ replied Soso. ‘If you don’t leave immediately, I’ll call the watchman!’ ” Beso slunk away.8 He apparently died of cirrhosis of the liver in 1909.

  Stalin sometimes sent money to help his mother but henceforth kept his distance from Keke whose dry wit and rough discipline resembled his own. There has been too much cod-psychology about Stalin’s childhood but this much is certain: raised in a poor priest-ridden household, he was damaged by violence, insecurity and suspicion but inspired by the local traditions of religious dogmatism, blood-feuding and romantic brigandry. “Stalin did not like to speak about his parents and childhood” but it is meaningless to over-analyse his psychology. He was emotionally stunted and lacked empathy yet his antennae were supersensitive. He was abnormal but Stalin himself understood that politicians are rarely normal: History, he wrote later, is full of “abnormal people.”

  The seminary provided his only formal education. This boarding school’s catechismic teaching and “Jesuitical methods” of “surveillance, spying, invasion of the inner life, the violation of people’s feelings” repelled, but impressed, Soso so acutely that he spent the rest of his life refining their style and methods. It stimulated this autodidact’s passion for reading but he became an atheist in the first year. “I got some friends,” he said, “and a bitter debate started between the believers and us!” He soon embraced Marxism.

  In 1899, he was expelled from the seminary, joined the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party and became a professional revolutionary, adopting the nom de revolution Koba, inspired by the hero of a novel, The Parricide, by Alexander Kazbegi, a dashing, vindictive Caucasian outlaw. He combined the “science” of Marxism with his soaring imagination: he wrote romantic poetry, published in Georgian, before working as a weatherman at the Tiflis Meteorological Institute, the only job he held before becoming one of the rulers of Russia in 1917.

  “Koba” was convinced by the universal panacea of Marxism, “a philosophical system” that suited the obsessive totality of his character. The class struggle also matched his own melodramatic pugnacity. The paranoid secrecy of the intolerant and idiosyncratic Bolshevik culture dovetailed with Koba’s own self-contained confidence and talent for intrigue. Koba plunged into the underworld of revolutionary politics that was a seething, stimulating mixture of conspiratorial intrigue, ideological nitpicking, scholarly education, factional games, love affairs with other revolutionaries, police infiltration and organizational chaos. These revolutionaries hailed from every background—Russians, Armenians, Georgians and Jews, workers, noblemen, intellectuals and daredevils—and organized strikes, printing presses, meetings and heists. United in the obsessional study of Marxist literature, there was always a division between the educated bourgeois émigrés, like Lenin himself, and the rough men of action in Russia itself. The underground life, always itinerant and dangerous, was the formative experience not only of Stalin but of all his comrades. This explains much that happens later.1

  In 1902, Koba won the spurs of his first arrest and Siberian exile, the first of seven such exiles from which he escaped six times. These exiles were far from Stalin’s brutal concentration camps: the Tsars were inept policemen. They were almost reading holidays in distant Siberian villages with one part-time gendarme on duty, during which revolutionaries got to know (and hate) each other, corresponded with their comrades in Petersburg or Vienna, discussed abstruse questions of dialectical materialism, and had affairs with local girls. When the call of freedom or revolution became urgent, they escaped, yomping across the taiga to the nearest train. In exile, Koba’s teeth, a lifelong source of pain, began to deteriorate.

  Koba avidly supported Vladimir Lenin and his seminal work, What Is to Be Done? This domineering political genius combined the Machiavellian practicality of seizing power with mastery of Marxist ideology. Exploiting the schism that would lead to the creation of his own Bolshevik Party, Lenin’s message was that a supreme Party of professional revolutionaries could seize power for the workers and then rule in their name in a “dictatorship of the proletariat” until this was no longer necessary because socialism had been achieved. Lenin’s vision of the Party as “the advance detachment” of the “army of proletarians . . . a fighting group of leaders” set the militarist tone of Bolshevism.2

  In 1904, on Koba’s return to Tiflis, he met his future father-in-law Sergei Alliluyev, twelve years his senior, a skilled Russian electrical artisan married to Olga Fedorenko, a strong-willed Georgian-German-Gypsy beauty with a taste for love affairs with revolutionaries, Poles, Hungarians, even Turks. It was whispered that Olga had an affair with the young Stalin, who fathered his future wife, Nadya. This is false since Nadezhda was already three when her parents first met Koba, but his affair with Olga is entirely credible and he himself may have hinted at it. Olga, who, according to her granddaughter Svetlana, had a “weakness for southern men,” saying “Russian men are boors,” always had a “soft spot” for Stalin. Her marriage was difficult. Family legend has Nadya’s elder brother Pavel seeing his mother making up to Koba. Such short liaisons were everyday occurrences among revolutionaries.

  Long before they fell in love, Stalin and Nadya were part of the Bolshevik family who passed through the Alliluyev household: Kalinin and Yenukidze among others at that dinner in 1932. There was another special link: soon afterwards, Koba met the Alliluyevs in Baku, and saved Nadya from drowning in the Caspian Sea, a romantic bond if ever there was one.3

  Koba meanwhile married another sprig of a Bolshevik family. Ekaterina, “Kato,” a placid, darkly pretty Georgian daughter of a cultured family, was the sister of Alexander Svanidze, also a Bolshevik graduate of the Tiflis seminary who joined Stalin’s Kremlin entourage. Living in a hut near the Baku oilfields, Kato gave him a son, Yakov. But Koba’s appearances at home were sporadic and unpredictable.

  During the 1905 Revolution, in which Leon Trotsky, a Jewish journalist, bestrode the Petersburg Soviet, Koba claimed he was organizing peasant revolts in the Kartli region of Georgia. After the Tsarist backl
ash, he travelled to a Bolshevik conference in Tammerfors, Finland—his first meeting with his hero, Lenin, “that mountain eagle.” The next year, Koba travelled to the Congress in Stockholm. On his return, he lived the life of a Caucasian brigand, raising Party funds in bank robberies or “expropriations”: he boasted in old age of these “heists . . . our friends grabbed 250,000 roubles in Yerevan Square!”

  After visiting London for a Congress, Koba’s beloved, half-ignored Kato died “in his arms” in Tiflis of tuberculosis on 25 November 1907. Koba was heartbroken. When the little procession reached the cemetery, Koba pressed a friend’s hand and said, “This creature softened my heart of stone. She died and with her died my last warm feelings for people.” He pressed his heart: “It’s desolate here inside.” Yet he left their son Yakov to be brought up by Kato’s family. After hiding in the Alliluyevs’ Petersburg apartment, he was recaptured and returned to his place of banishment, Solvychegodsk. It was in this remote one-horse town in January 1910 that Koba moved into the house of a young widow named Maria Kuzakova by whom he fathered a son.9 Soon afterwards, he was involved in a love affair with a schoolgirl of seventeen named Pelageya Onufrieva. When she went back to school, he wrote: “Let me kiss you now. I am not simply sending a kiss but am KISSSSSING you passionately (it’s not worth kissing otherwise).” The locals in the north Russified “Iosef ” to “Osip” and his letters to Pelageya were often signed by her revealing nickname for him: “Oddball Osip.”4

  After yet another escape, Koba returned to Petersburg in 1912, sharing digs with a ponderous Bolshevik who was to be the comrade most closely associated with him: Vyacheslav Scriabin, only twenty-two, had just followed the Bolshevik custom of assuming a macho nom de revolution and called himself that “industrial name” Molotov—“the hammer.” Koba had also assumed an “industrial” alias: he first signed an article “Stalin” in 1913. It was no coincidence that “Stalin” sounds like “Lenin.” He may have been using it earlier and not just for its metallic grit. Perhaps he borrowed the name from the “buxom pretty” Bolshevik named Ludmilla Stal with whom he had had an affair.5