Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  This “wonderful Georgian,” as Lenin called him, was co-opted by the Party’s Central Committee at the end of the Prague conference of 1912. In November, Koba Stalin travelled from Vienna to Cracow to meet Lenin with whom he stayed: the leader supervised his keen disciple in the writing of an article expressing Bolshevik policy on the sensitive nationality question, henceforth Stalin’s expertise. “Marxism and the National Question,” arguing for holding together the Russian Empire, won him ideological kudos and Lenin’s trust.

  “Did you write all of it?” asked Lenin (according to Stalin).

  “Yes . . . Did I make mistakes?”

  “No, on the contrary, splendid!” This was his last trip abroad until the Teheran Conference in 1943.

  In February 1913, Stalin was rearrested and given a suspiciously light exile: was he an agent of the Tsar’s secret police, the Okhrana? The historical sensationalism of Stalin’s duplicity shows a naïve misunderstanding of underground life: the revolutionaries were riddled with Okhrana spies but many were double or triple agents.10 Koba was willing to betray colleagues who opposed him though, as the Okhrana admitted in their reports, he remained a fanatical Marxist—and that is what mattered.

  Stalin’s final exile began in 1913 in the distant cold north-east of Siberia, where he was nicknamed “Pock-marked Joe” by the local peasants. Fearing more escapes, the exile was moved to Kureika, a desolate village in Turukhansk, north of the Arctic Circle where his fishing prowess convinced locals of magical powers and he took another mistress. Stalin wrote pitiful letters to Sergei and Olga Alliluyev: “Nature in this cursed region is shamefully poor” and he begged them to send him a postcard: “I’m crazy with longing for nature scenes if only on paper.” Yet it was also, strangely, a happy time, perhaps the happiest of his life for he reminisced about his exploits there until his death, particularly about the shooting expedition when he skied into the taiga, bagged many partridges and then almost froze to death on the way back.6

  The military blunders and food shortages of the Great War inexorably destroyed the monarchy which, to the surprise of the Bolsheviks, collapsed suddenly in February 1917, replaced by a Provisional Government. On 12 March, Stalin reached the capital and visited the Alliluyevs: once again, Nadya, a striking brunette, sixteen, her sister Anna and brother Fyodor, questioned this returning hero about his adventures. When they accompanied him by tram towards the offices of the newspaper Pravda, he called out, “Be sure to set aside a room in the new apartment for me. Don’t forget.” He found Molotov editing Pravda, a job he immediately commandeered for himself. While Molotov had taken a radical anti-government line, Stalin and Lev Kamenev, né Rosenfeld, one of Lenin’s closest comrades, were more conciliatory. Lenin, who arrived on 4 April, overruled Stalin’s vacillations.

  In a rare apology to Molotov, Stalin conceded, “You were closer to Lenin . . .” When Lenin needed to escape to Finland to avoid arrest, Stalin hid him chez Alliluyev, shaved off his beard and escorted him to safety. The sisters, Anna, who worked at Bolshevik headquarters, and Nadya, waited up at night. The Georgian entertained them, mimicking politicians and reading aloud Chekhov, Pushkin or Gorky, as he would later read to his sons.7 On 25 October 1917, Lenin launched the Bolshevik Revolution.

  Stalin may have been a “grey blur” in those days, but he was Lenin’s own blur. Trotsky admitted that contact with Lenin was mainly through Stalin because he was of less interest to the police. When Lenin formed the new government, Stalin founded his Commissariat of Nationalities with one secretary, young Fyodor Alliluyev, and one typist—Nadya.8

  In 1918, the Bolsheviks struggled for survival. Faced with a galloping German advance, Lenin and Trotsky were forced to make the pragmatic Brest-Litovsk agreement, ceding much of Ukraine and the Baltics to the Kaiser. After Germany’s collapse, British, French and Japanese troops intervened while White armies converged on the tottering regime, which moved its capital to Moscow to make it less vulnerable. Lenin’s beleaguered empire soon shrunk to the size of medieval Muscovy. In August, Lenin was wounded in an assassination attempt, avenged by the Bolsheviks with a wave of Terror. In September, the recuperating Lenin declared Russia “a military camp.” His most ruthless troubleshooters were Trotsky, the War Commissar, creating and directing the Red Army from his armoured train, and Stalin, the only two leaders allowed access without appointment to Lenin’s study. When Lenin formed an executive decision-making organ with just five members called the Political Bureau—or Politburo—both were members. The bespectacled Jewish intellectual was the hero of the Revolution, second only to Lenin himself, while Stalin seemed a rough provincial. But Trotsky’s patronising grandeur offended the plain-spoken “old illegals” of the regions who were more impressed with Stalin’s hard-nosed practicality. Stalin identified Trotsky as the main obstacle to his rise.

  The city of Tsaritsyn played a decisive role in Stalin’s career—and his marriage. In 1918, the key strategic city on the Lower Volga, the gateway to the grain (and oil) of the North Caucasus and the southerly key to Moscow, looked as if it was likely to fall to the Whites. Lenin despatched Stalin to Tsaritsyn as Director-General of Food Supplies in south Russia. But the latter soon managed to get his status raised to Commissar with sweeping military powers.

  In an armoured train, with 400 Red Guards, Fyodor Alliluyev and his teenage typist Nadya, Stalin steamed into Tsaritsyn on 6 April to find the city beset with ineptitude and betrayal. Stalin showed he meant business by shooting any suspected counter-revolutionaries: “a ruthless purge of the rear,” wrote Voroshilov, “administered by an iron hand.”

  Lenin ordered him to be ever more “merciless” and “ruthless.” Stalin replied: “Be assured our hand will not tremble.” It was here that Stalin grasped the convenience of death as the simplest and most effective political tool but he was hardly alone in this: during the Civil War, the Bolsheviks, clad in leather boots, coats and holsters, embraced a cult of the glamour of violence, a macho brutality that Stalin made his own. It was here too that Stalin met and befriended Voroshilov and Budyonny, both at that dinner on 8 November 1932, who formed the nucleus of his military and political support. When the military situation deteriorated in July, Stalin effectively took control of the army: “I must have military powers.” This was the sort of leadership the Revolution required to survive but it was a challenge to Trotsky who had created his Red Army with the help of so-called “military experts,” ex-Tsarist officers. Stalin distrusted these useful renegades and shot them whenever possible.

  He resided in the plush lounge carriage that had once belonged to a Gypsy torch singer who decorated it in light blue silk. Here Nadya and Stalin probably became lovers. She was seventeen, he was thirty-nine. It must have been a thrilling, terrifying adventure for a schoolgirl. When they arrived, Stalin used the train as his headquarters: it was from here that he ordered the constant shootings by the Cheka. This was a time when women accompanied their husbands to war: Nadya was not alone. Voroshilov and Budyonny’s wives were in Tsaritsyn too.

  Stalin and these swashbucklers formed a “military opposition” against Trotsky whom he revealingly called an “operetta commander, a chatterbox, ha-ha-ha!” When he arrested a group of Trotsky’s “specialists” and imprisoned them on a barge on the Volga, Trotsky angrily objected. The barge sank with all aboard. “Death solves all problems,” Stalin is meant to have said. “No man, no problem.” It was the Bolshevik way.11

  Lenin recalled Stalin. It did not matter that he had probably made things worse, wasted the expertise of Tsarist officers and backed a crew of sabre-waving daredevils. Stalin had been ruthless—the merciless application of pressure was what Lenin wanted. But the “Oddball” kinto had glimpsed the glory of the Generalissimo. More than that, the enmity with Trotsky and the alliance with the “Tsaritsyn Group” of cavalrymen were seminal: perhaps he admired Voroshilov and Budyonny’s macho devil-may-care courage, a quality he lacked. His loathing for Trotsky became one of the moving passions of his life. He mar
ried Nadya on his return, moving into a modest Kremlin flat (shared with the whole Alliluyev family) and, later, a fine dacha named Zubalovo. 9

  In May 1920, Stalin was appointed Political Commissar to the South-Western Front after the Poles had captured Kiev. The Politburo ordered the conquest of Poland to spread the Revolution westwards. The commander of the Western Front pushing on Warsaw was a brilliant young man named Mikhail Tukhachevsky. When Stalin was ordered to transfer his cavalry to Tukhachevsky, he refused until it was already too late. The vendettas reverberating from this fiasco ended in slaughter seventeen years later.10

  In 1921, Nadya showed her Bolshevik austerity by walking to hospital, where she gave birth to a son, Vasily, followed five years later by a daughter, Svetlana. Nadya meanwhile worked as a typist in Lenin’s office where she was to prove very useful in the coming intrigues.

  The “vanguard” of Bolsheviks, many young and now blooded by the brutality of that struggle, found themselves a tiny, isolated and embattled minority nervously ruling a vast ruined Empire, itself besieged by a hostile world. Contemptuous of the workers and peasants, Lenin was nonetheless surprised to discover that neither of these classes supported them. Lenin thus proposed a single organ to rule and oversee the creation of socialism: the Party. It was this embarrassing gap between reality and aspiration that made the Party’s quasi-religious fidelity to ideological purity so important, its military discipline so obligatory.

  In this peculiar dilemma, they improvised a peculiar system and sought solace in a uniquely peculiar view of the world. The Party’s sovereign organ was the Central Committee (CC), the top seventy or so officials, who were elected annually by Party Congresses which, later, were held ever less frequently. The CC elected the small Politburo, a super–War Cabinet that decided policy, and a Secretariat of about three Secretaries to run the Party. They directed the conventional government of a radically centralized, vertical one-Party State: Mikhail Kalinin, born in 1875, the only real peasant in the leadership, known as the “All-Union peasant elder,” became Head of State in 1919.12 Lenin ran the country as Premier, the Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, a cabinet of ministers which executed the Politburo’s orders. There was a sort of democracy within the Politburo but after the desperate crises of the Civil War, Lenin banned factions. The Party frantically recruited millions of new members but were they trustworthy? Gradually, an authoritarian bureaucratic dictatorship took the place of the honest debates of earlier days but in 1921, Lenin, that superlative improviser, restored a degree of capitalism, a compromise called the New Economic Policy (NEP), to save the regime.

  In 1922, Lenin and Kamenev engineered the appointment of Stalin as General Secretary—or Gensec—of the CC to run the Party. Stalin’s Secretariat was the engine room of the new state, giving him extensive powers: he demonstrated these in the “Georgian Affair” when he and Sergo annexed Georgia, which had seceded from the Empire, and then imposed their will on the independent-minded Georgian Party. Lenin was disgusted but his stroke in December 1922 prevented him moving against Stalin. The Politburo, taking control of the health of the Party’s greatest asset, banned him from working more than ten minutes a day. When Lenin tried to do more, Stalin insulted Lenin’s wife Krupskaya, a tantrum that could have ended his career.13

  Lenin alone could see that Stalin was emerging as his most likely successor so he secretly dictated a damning Testament demanding his dismissal. Lenin was felled by a fatal stroke on 21 January 1924. Against the wishes of Lenin and his family, Stalin orchestrated the effective deification of the leader and his embalming like an Orthodox saint in a Mausoleum on Red Square. Stalin commandeered the sacred orthodoxy of his late hero to build up his own power.

  An outsider in 1924 would have expected Trotsky to succeed Lenin, but in the Bolshevik oligarchy, this glittery fame counted against the insouciant War Commissar. The hatred between Stalin and Trotsky was not only based on personality and style but also on policy. Stalin had already used the massive patronage of the Secretariat to promote his allies, Molotov, Voroshilov and Sergo; he also supplied an encouraging and realistic alternative to Trotsky’s insistence on European revolution: “Socialism in One Country.” The other members of the Politburo, led by Grigory Zinoviev, and Kamenev, Lenin’s closest associates, were also terrified of Trotsky, who had united all against himself. So when Lenin’s Testament was unveiled in 1924, Kamenev proposed to let Stalin remain as Secretary, little realizing that there would be no other real opportunity to remove him for thirty years. Trotsky, the Revolution’s preening panjandrum, was defeated with surprising ease and speed. Having dismissed Trotsky from his power base as War Commissar, Zinoviev and Kamenev discovered too late that their co-triumvir Stalin was the real threat.

  By 1926, Stalin had defeated them too, helped by his Rightist allies, Nikolai Bukharin and Alexei Rykov, who had succeeded Lenin as Premier. Stalin and Bukharin supported the NEP. But many of the regional hard-liners feared that compromise undermined Bolshevism itself, putting off the reckoning day with the hostile peasantry. In 1927, a grain crisis brought this to a head, unleashed the Bolshevik taste for extreme solutions to their problems, and set the country on a repressive martial footing that would last until Stalin’s death.

  In January 1928, Stalin himself travelled to Siberia to investigate the drop in grain deliveries. Replaying his glorious role as Civil War commissar, Stalin ordered the forcible gathering of grain and blamed the shortage on the so-called kulaks, who were hoarding their harvest in the hope of higher prices. “Kulak” usually meant a peasant who employed a couple of labourers or owned a pair of cows. “I gave a good shaking to the Party Organs,” Stalin said later but he soon discovered that “the Rightists didn’t like harsh measures . . . they thought it the beginning of civil war in the villages.”

  On his return, Premier Rykov threatened Stalin: “Criminal charges should be filed against you!” However, the rough young commissars, the “committee men” at the heart of the Party, supported Stalin’s violent requisitioning of grain. Every winter, they headed into the hinterlands to squeeze the grain out of the kulaks who were identified as the main enemies of the Revolution. However, they realized the NEP had failed. They had to find a radical, military solution to the food crisis.

  Stalin was a natural radical and now he shamelessly stole the clothes of the Leftists he had just defeated. He and his allies were already talking of a final new Revolution, the “Great Turn” leftwards to solve the problem of the peasantry and economic backwardness. These Bolsheviks hated the obstinate old world of the peasants: they had to be herded into collective farms, their grain forcibly collected and sold abroad to fund a manic gallop to create an instant industrial powerhouse that could produce tanks and planes. Private trade of food was stopped. Kulaks were ordered to deliver their grain and prosecuted as speculators if they did not. Gradually, the villagers themselves were forced into collectives. Anyone who resisted was a “kulak enemy.”

  Similarly, in industry, the Bolsheviks unleashed their hatred of technical experts, or “bourgeois specialists”—actually just middle-class engineers. While they trained their own new Red élite, they intimidated those who said Stalin’s industrial plans were impossible with a series of faked trials that started at the Shakhty coal mine. Nothing was impossible. The resulting rural nightmare was like a war without battles but with death on a monumental scale.11 Yet the warlords of this struggle, Stalin’s magnates and their wives, still lived in the Kremlin like a surprisingly cosy family.

  2

  The Kremlin Family

  Oh what a wonderful time it was,” wrote Voroshilov’s wife in her diary. “What simple, nice, friendly relationships.”1 The intimate collegiate life of the leaders up until the mid-thirties could not have been further from the cliché of Stalin’s dreary, terrifying world. In the Kremlin, they were always in and out of each other’s houses. Parents and children saw each other constantly. The Kremlin was a village of unparalleled intimacy. Bred by decade
s of fondness (and of course resentments), friendships deepened or frayed, enmities seethed. Stalin often dropped in on his neighbours the Kaganoviches for a chess game. Natasha Andreyeva remembers Stalin frequently putting his head round their door looking for her parents: “Is Andrei here or Dora Moisevna?” Sometimes he wanted to go to the cinema but her parents were late, so she went with Stalin herself. When Mikoyan needed something, he would simply cross the courtyard and knock on Stalin’s door, where he would be invited in for dinner. If he was not at home, they pushed a note under the door. “Your leaving’s most unfortunate,” wrote Voroshilov. “I called on your apartment and no one answered.” 2

  When Stalin was on holiday, this merry band continually dropped in on Nadya to send her husband messages and catch up on the latest political gossip: “Yesterday Mikoyan called in and asked after your health and said he’ll visit you in Sochi,” Nadya wrote to Stalin in September 1929. “Today Voroshilov is back from Nalchik and he called me . . .” Voroshilov in turn gave her news of Sergo. A few days later, Sergo visited her with Voroshilov. Next she talked to Kaganovich who sent his regards to Stalin. Some families were more private than others: while the Mikoyans were highly sociable, the Molotovs, on the same floor as them, were more reserved and blocked up the door between their apartments. 3 If Stalin was the undoubted headmaster of this chatty, bickering school, then Molotov was its prissy prefect.