Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  The only man to shake hands with Lenin, Hitler, Himmler, Göring, Roosevelt and Churchill, Molotov was Stalin’s closest ally. Nicknamed “Stone-Arse” for his indefatigable work rate, Molotov liked to correct people ponderously and tell them that Lenin himself had actually given him the soubriquet “Iron-Arse.” Small, stocky with a bulging forehead, chilling hazel eyes blinking behind round spectacles, and a stammer when angry (or talking to Stalin), Molotov, thirty-nine, looked like a bourgeois student, which he had indeed been. Even among a Politburo of believers, he was a stickler for Bolshevik theory and severity: the Robespierre of Stalin’s court. Yet he also possessed an instinct for the possible in power politics: “I am a man of the Nineteenth Century,” said Molotov.

  Born in Kukarla, a provincial backwater near Perm (soon renamed Molotov), Vyacheslav Scriabin was the son of a boozy salesman, a poor nobleman but no relation to the composer. He had played the violin for merchants in his home town and, unusually for Stalin’s men, had a glancing secondary education though he became a revolutionary at sixteen. Molotov regarded himself as a journalist—he first met Stalin when they both worked on Pravda . He was cruel and vengeful, actually recommending death for those, even women, who crossed him. Harsh to his subordinates, with whom he constantly lost his temper, he was so disciplined that he would declare to his office that he would take “a thirteen-minute nap,” then wake up on the thirteenth minute. Unlike many of the Politburo’s energetic showmen, Molotov was an uninspired “plodder.”

  A candidate Politburo member since 1921, “our Vecha” had been Party Secretary before Stalin but Lenin denounced Molotov for the “most shameful bureaucratism, and the most stupid.” When Trotsky attacked him, he revealed the intellectual inferiority complex he shared with Stalin and Voroshilov: “We can’t all be geniuses, Comrade Trotsky,” he replied. The chips on the shoulders of these home-grown Bolsheviks were mountainous.

  Now Second Secretary after Stalin himself, Molotov admired Koba but did not worship him. He often disagreed with, and criticized, Stalin right up until the end. He could outdrink anyone in the leadership— no mean feat among so many alcoholics. He seemed to enjoy Stalin’s teasing, even when he called him the Jewish “Molotstein.”

  His saving grace was his devotion to Polina Karpovskaya, his Jewish wife, known by her nom de guerre Zhemchuzhina, “the Pearl.” Never beautiful but bold and intelligent, Polina dominated Molotov, worshipped Stalin and became a leader in her own right. Both devoted Bolsheviks, they had fallen in love at a women’s conference in 1921. Molotov thought her “clever, beautiful and above all a great Bolshevik.”

  She was the consolation for the discipline, stress and severity of his crusade, yet Molotov was no automaton. His love letters show how he idolized her like a schoolboy in love. “Polinka, darling, my love! I shan’t hide that sometimes I’m overcome with impatience and desire for your closeness and caresses. I kiss you, my beloved, desired . . . Your loving Vecha. I’m tied to you body and soul . . .” Sometimes the letters were wildly passionate: “I wait to kiss you impatiently and kiss you everywhere, adored, sweetie, my love.” She was his “bright love, my heart and happiness, my pleasure honey, Polinka.”4

  Molotov’s spoiled daughter, Svetlana, and the other Politburo children played in the courtyard but “we didn’t want to live in the Kremlin. We were constantly told by our parents not to be noisy. ‘You’re not in the street now,’ they’d say. ‘You’re in the Kremlin.’ It was like a jail and we had to show passes and get passes for our friends to visit us,” remembers Natasha, the daughter of Andreyev and Dora Khazan. The children constantly bumped into Stalin: “When I was ten with long plaits playing hop, skip and jump with Rudolf Menzhinsky [son of the OGPU chief ], I was suddenly lifted up by strong hands and I wriggled round and saw Stalin’s face with its brown eyes and very intense, strict expression. ‘So who are you?’ he asked. I said ‘Andreyeva.’ ‘Well, go on jumping then!’ Afterwards, Stalin frequently chatted to her, particularly since the Kremlin’s earliest cinema was reached by a staircase near their front door.

  Often Stalin’s dinner was simply a continuation of his meetings with workaholic comrades: soup was placed on the sideboard, guests could help themselves and they frequently worked until 3 a.m., recalls Stalin’s adopted son Artyom. “I saw Molotov, Mikoyan and Kaganovich all the time.” Stalin and Nadya often dined with the other Kremlin couples. “Dinners were simple,” wrote Mikoyan in his memoirs. “Two courses, a few starters, sometimes some herring . . . Soup for first course then meat or fish and fruit for dessert—it was like anywhere else then.” There was a bottle of white wine and little drinking. No one sat at table for more than half an hour. One evening, Stalin who took a serious interest in political image, emulated Peter the Great’s barbering exploits: “Get rid of that beard!” he ordered Kaganovich, asking Nadya, “Can I have some scissors? I’ll do it myself.”14 Kaganovich did it there and then. Such was the entertainment at Stalin and Nadya’s for dinner.

  The wives were influential. Stalin listened to Nadya: she had met a big-eared rotund young hobbledehoy, a fitter on the mines of the Donets, Khrushchev, at the Academy where he was energetically crushing the opposition. She recommended him to Stalin who launched his career. Stalin regularly had the young official to dinner with Nadya. Stalin always liked Khrushchev, partly because of Nadya’s recommendation. This was, remembered Khrushchev, “how I survived . . . my lottery ticket.” He simply could not believe that here was Stalin, the demigod he worshipped, “laughing and joking” with him so modestly.

  Nadya fearlessly approached Stalin about injustices: when an official, probably a Rightist, was sacked from his job, she pleaded for his career and told Stalin that “these methods should not be used with such workers . . . it’s so sad . . . He looked as if he’d been killed. I know you really hate me interfering but I think you should interfere in this case which everyone knows is unfair.” Stalin unexpectedly agreed to help and she was thrilled: “I’m so glad you trust me . . . it’s a shame not to correct a mistake.” Stalin did not take such interference kindly from anyone else but he seemed to be able to take it from his young wife.

  Polina Molotova was so ambitious that when she decided her boss as Commissar for Light Industry was not up to the job, she asked Stalin during dinner if she could create a Soviet perfume industry. Stalin called in Mikoyan and placed her TeZhe perfume trust under him. She became the Tsarina of Soviet fragrance. Mikoyan admired her as “capable, clever, and vigorous” but “haughty.”5

  Except for the snobbish Molotovs, these potentates still lived simply in the palaces of the Kremlin, inspired by their devout revolutionary mission with its obligatory “Bolshevik modesty.” Corruption and extravagance were not yet widespread: indeed, the Politburo wives could barely afford to dress their children and the new archives show that Stalin himself sometimes ran out of money.

  Nadya Stalin and Dora Khazan, the ascendant Andreyev’s wife, daily caught the tram to the Academy. Nadya is always held up as a paragon of modesty for using her maiden name but Dora did the same: it was the style of the times. Sergo banned his daughter taking his limousine to school: “too bourgeois!” The Molotovs on the other hand were already notoriously unproletarian: Natalya Rykova heard her father complain that the Molotovs never invited their bodyguards to eat at table with them.

  At Stalin’s, Nadya was in charge: Svetlana says that her mother managed the household on “a modest budget.” They prided themselves on their Bolshevik austerity. Nadya regularly exhausted her housekeeping money: “Please send me 50 roubles because I only get my money on 15 October and I’ve got none.”

  “Tatka, I forgot to send the money,” replied Stalin. “But I’ve now sent it (120 roubles) with colleagues leaving today . . . Kiss you, Joseph.” Then he checked she had received it. She replied: “I got the letter with the money. Thanks! Glad you’re coming back! Write when you’re arriving so I can meet you!”6

  On 3 January 1928, Stalin wrote to Khalatov, the chief of
GIZ (the State Publishing House): “I’m in great need of money. Would you send me 200 roubles!”15 Stalin cultivated his puritanism out of both conviction and taste: when he found new furniture in his apartment, he reacted viciously: “It seems someone from housekeeping or the GPU bought some furniture . . . contrary to my order that old furniture is fine,” he wrote. “Discover and punish the guilty! I ask you to remove the furniture and put it in storage!”15

  The Mikoyans had so many children—five boys plus some adopted children and, in the summer, the extended Armenian family arrived for three months—that they were short of money even though Mikoyan himself was one of the top half-dozen men in Russia. So Ashken Mikoyan secretly borrowed money from the other Politburo wives who had fewer children. Mikoyan would have been furious if he had known about it, according to his sons. When Polina Molotova saw the shabby Mikoyan children, she reprimanded their mother, who retorted: “I have five boys and I haven’t got the money.”

  “But,” snapped Polina, “you’re the wife of a Politburo member!”7

  3

  The Charmer

  This small group of idealistic, ruthless magnates, mainly in their thirties, was the engine of a vast and awesome Revolution: they would build socialism immediately and abolish capitalism. Their industrial programme, the Five-Year Plan, would make Russia a great power never again to be humiliated by the West. Their war on the countryside would forever exterminate the internal enemy, the kulaks, and return the Party to the values of 1917. It was Lenin who said, “Merciless mass terror against the kulaks . . . Death to them!” Thousands of young people shared their idealism. The Plan demanded a 110 percent rise in productivity which Stalin, Kuibyshev and Sergo insisted was possible because everything was possible. “To lower the tempo means to lag behind,” explained Stalin in 1931. “And laggards are beaten! But we don’t want to be beaten . . . The history of old Russia consisted . . . in her being beaten . . . for her backwardness.”

  The Bolsheviks could “storm any fortress.” Any doubt was treason. Death was the price of progress. Surrounded by enemies, as they had been in the Civil War, they felt they were only just managing to keep control over the country. Hence they cultivated tverdost, hardness, the Bolshevik virtue.16 Stalin was praised for it: “Yes he vigorously chops off

  what is rotten . . . If he didn’t, he wouldn’t be . . . a Communist fighter.” Stalin wrote to Molotov about “inspecting and checking by punching people in the face” and openly told officials he would “smash their bones.”

  Bukharin resisted “Stalin’s Revolution” but he and Rykov were no match for either Stalin’s patronage and charm or the Bolshevik taste for recklessly violent solutions. In 1929, Trotsky travelled into exile, with a look of stunned hauteur on his face, to become Stalin’s mocking critic abroad, and his ultimate symbol of treason and heresy at home. Bukharin was voted off the Politburo. Now Stalin was the leader of the oligarchs but he was far from a dictator.

  In November 1929, while Nadya studied for her exams at the Industrial Academy, Stalin returned refreshed from his holidays and immediately intensified the war on the peasantry, demanding “an offensive against the kulaks . . . to get ready for action and to deal the kulak class such a blow that it will no longer rise to its feet.” But the peasants refused to sow their crops, declaring war on the regime.

  On 21 December 1929, at the exhilarating height of this colossal and terrible enterprise, the young magnates and their wives, weary but febrile from their remarkable achievements in building new cities and factories, blooded by the excitement of brutal expeditions against the obstinate peasants, arrived at Stalin’s Zubalovo dacha to celebrate his official fiftieth birthday, the night our story really begins. That day, the magnates each wrote an article in Pravda hailing him as the Vozhd, the leader, Lenin’s rightful heir.

  Days after the birthday party, the magnates realised they had to escalate their war on the countryside and literally “liquidate the kulaks as a class.” They unleashed a secret police war in which organized brutality, vicious pillage and fanatical ideology vied with one another to destroy the lives of millions. Stalin’s circle was to be fatally tested by the rigours of collectivization because they were judged by their performance in this ultimate crisis. The poison of these months tainted Stalin’s friendships, even his marriage, beginning the process that would culminate in the torture chambers of 1937.

  Stalin spent half his letters to his men losing his temper and the other half apologizing for it. He treated everything personally: when Molotov had returned from a grain expedition to the Ukraine, Stalin told him, “I could cover you with kisses in gratitude for your action down there”— hardly the dour Stalin of legend.

  In January 1930, Molotov planned the destruction of the kulaks, who were divided into three categories: “First category: . . . to be immediately eliminated”; the second, to be imprisoned in camps; the third, 150,000 households, to be deported. Molotov oversaw the death squads, the railway carriages, the concentration camps like a military commander. Between five and seven million people ultimately fitted into the three categories. There was no way to select a kulak: Stalin himself agonized,17 scribbling in his notes: “What does kulak mean?”

  During 1930–31, about 1.68 million people were deported to the east and north. Within months, Stalin and Molotov’s plan had led to 2,200 rebellions involving more than 800,000 people. Kaganovich and Mikoyan led expeditions into the countryside with brigades of OGPU troopers and armoured trains like warlords. The magnates’ handwritten letters to Stalin ring with the fraternal thrill of their war for human betterment against unarmed peasants: “Taking all measures about food and grain,” Mikoyan reported to Stalin, citing the need to dismiss “wreckers”: “We face big resistance . . . We need to destroy the resistance.” In Kaganovich’s photograph album, we find him heading out into Siberia with his armed posse of leather-jacketed ruffians, interrogating peasants, poking around in their haystacks, finding the grain, deporting the culprits and moving on again, exhausted, falling asleep between stops. “Molotov works really hard and is very tired,” Mikoyan told Stalin. “The mass of work is so vast it needs horsepower . . .”

  Sergo and Kaganovich possessed the necessary “horsepower”: when the leaders decided on something, it could be done instantly, on a massive scale and regardless of waste in terms of human lives and resources. “When we Bolsheviks want to get something done,” Beria, a rising Georgian secret policeman, said later, “we close our eyes to everything else.” This pitiless fraternity lived in a sleepless frenzy of excitement and activity, driven by adrenalin and conviction. Regarding themselves like God on the first day, they were creating a new world in a red-hot frenzy: the big beasts of the Politburo personified the qualities of the Stalinist Commissar, “Party-mindedness, morality, exactingness, attentiveness, good health, knowing their business well” but above all, as Stalin put it, they required “bull nerves.”

  “I took part in this myself,” wrote a young activist, Lev Kopelev, “scouring the countryside, searching for hidden grain . . . I emptied out the old folks’ storage chests, stopping my ears to the children’s crying and the women’s wails . . . I was convinced I was accomplishing the great and necessary transformation of the countryside.”

  The peasants believed they could force the government to stop by destroying their own livestock: the despair that could lead a peasant to kill his own animals, the equivalent in our world of burning down our own house, gives a hint of the scale of desperation: 26.6 million head of cattle were slaughtered, 15.3 million horses. On 16 January 1930, the government decreed that kulak property could be confiscated if they destroyed livestock. If the peasants thought the Bolsheviks would be obliged to feed them, they were mistaken.1 As the crisis worsened, even Stalin’s staunchest lieutenants struggled to squeeze the grain out of the peasantry, especially in the Ukraine and North Caucasus. Stalin berated them but even though they were often twenty years younger, they replied with tantrums and threats of resignatio
n. Stalin was constantly pouring unction on troubled waters. Andrei Andreyev, thirty-five, the boss of the North Caucasus, was close to Stalin (his wife Dora was Nadya’s best friend). Nonetheless, he said Stalin’s demands were impossible: he needed at least five years.

  First Molotov tried to encourage him: “Dear Andreievich, I got your letter on grain supplies, I see it’s very hard for you. I see also that the kulaks are using new methods of struggle against us. But I hope we’ll break their backs . . . I send you greetings and best wishes . . . PS: Hurrying off to Crimea for the holidays.”2

  Then Stalin, overwrought, lost his temper with Andreyev who sulked until Stalin apologized: “Comrade Andreyev, I don’t think you do nothing in the field of grain supply. But the grain supplies from the North Caucasus are cutting us like a knife and we need measures to strengthen the process. Please remember, every new million poods is very valuable for us. Please remember, we have very little time. So to work? With Communist greetings, Stalin.”

  But Andreyev was still upset so Stalin scribbled him another letter, this time calling him by a pet name and appealing to his Bolshevik honour: “Hello Andryusha, I’m late. Don’t be angry. About strategy . . . I take my words back. I’d like to stress again that close people must be trusted and honourable until the end. I speak about our top people. Without this our Party will utterly fail. I shake your hand, J. Stalin.” He often had to take back his own words.3

  The foundation of Stalin’s power in the Party was not fear: it was charm. Stalin possessed the dominant will among his magnates, but they also found his policies generally congenial. He was older than them all except President Kalinin, but the magnates used the informal “you” with him. Voroshilov, Molotov and Sergo called him “Koba.” They were sometimes even cheeky: Mikoyan, who called him Soso, signed one letter: “If you’re not lazy, write to me!” In 1930, all these magnates, especially the charismatic and fiery Sergo Ordzhonikidze, were allies, not protégés, all capable of independent action. There were close friendships that presented potential alliances against Stalin: Sergo and Kaganovich, the two toughest bosses, were best friends. Voroshilov, Mikoyan and Molotov frequently disagreed with Stalin.4 His dilemma was that he was the leader of a Party with no Führerprinzip but the ruler of a country accustomed to Tsarist autocracy.