Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  His brutality was more important than his punctuation: he had recently crushed peasant uprisings from the North Caucasus to western Siberia. Succeeding Molotov as Moscow boss and the hero of a cult approaching Stalin’s own, Iron Lazar began the vandalistic creation of a Bolshevik metropolis, enthusiastically dynamiting historic buildings.

  By the summer of 1931, a serious shortage in the countryside was beginning to develop into a famine. While the Politburo softened its campaign against industrial specialists in mid-July, the rural struggle continued. The GPU and the 180,000 Party workers sent from cities used the gun, the lynch mob and the Gulag camp system to break the villages. Over two million were deported to Siberia or Kazakhstan; in 1930, there were 179,000 slaving in the Gulags; almost a million by 1935.18 Terror and forced labour became the essence of Politburo business. On a sheet covered in doodles, Stalin scrawled in a thick blue pencil:

  Who can do the arrests?

  What to do with ex-White military in our industrial factories?

  Prisons must be emptied of prisoners. [He wanted them sentenced faster to make room for kulaks.]

  What to do with different groups arrested?

  To allow . . . deportations: Ukraine 145,000. N. Caucasus 71,000. Lower Volga 50,000 (a lot!), Belorussia 42,000 . . . West Siberia 50,000, East Siberia 30,000 . . .

  On and on it goes until he totals it up to 418,000 exiles.19 Meanwhile, he totted up the poods of grain and bread by hand on pieces of paper,28 like a village shopkeeper running an empire.20

  “Let’s get out of town,” scrawled Stalin, around this time, to Voroshilov, who replied on the same note:

  “Koba, can you see . . . Kalmykov for five minutes?”

  “I can,” answered Stalin. “Let’s head out of town and take him with us.”21 The war of extermination in the countryside in no way restrained the magnates’ country-house existence. They had been assigned dachas soon after the Revolution where, often, the real power was brokered.

  At the centre of this idyllic life was Zubalovo, near Usovo, 35 kilometres outside Moscow, where Stalin and several others had their dachas. Before the Revolution, a Baku oil nabob named Zubalov had built two walled estates, each with a mansion, one for his son, one for himself. There were four houses altogether, gabled Gothic dachas of German design. The Mikoyans shared the Big House at Zubalovo Two with a Red Army commander, a Polish Communist and Pavel Alliluyev. Voroshilov and other commanders shared a Little House. Their wives and children constantly visited one another—the extended family of the Revolution enjoying a Chekhovian summer.

  Stalin’s Zubalovo One was a magical world for the children. “It was a real life of freedom,” recalls Artyom. “Such happiness,” thought Svetlana. The parents lived upstairs, the children downstairs. The gardens were “sunny and abundant,” wrote Svetlana. Stalin was an enthusiastic gardener though he preferred inspecting and clipping roses to real labour. Photographs show him taking his little children for strolls round the gardens. There was a library, a billiard room, a Russian bath and later a cinema. Svetlana adored this “happy sheltered life” with its vegetable gardens, orchards and a farm where they milked cows and fed geese, chickens and guinea fowl, cats and white rabbits. “We had huge white lilacs, dark purple lilacs, jasmine which my mother loved, and a very fragrant shrub with a lemony smell. We walked in the woods with nanny. Picked wild strawberries and black currants and cherries.”

  “Stalin’s house,” remembers Artyom, “was full of friends.” Nadya’s parents Sergei and Olga were always there—though they now lived apart. They stayed at different ends of the house but bickered at table. While Sergei enjoyed mending anything in the house and was friendly with the servants, Olga, according to Svetlana, “threw herself into the role of grand lady and loved her high position which my mother never did.”

  Nadya played tennis with an immaculate Voroshilov, when he was sober, and Kaganovich, who played in his tunic and boots. Mikoyan, Voroshilov and Budyonny29 rode horses donated by the Cavalry Inspectorate. If it was winter, Kaganovich and Mikoyan skied. Molotov pulled his daughter in a sledge like a nag pulling a peasant’s plough. Voroshilov and Sergo were avid hunters. Stalin preferred billiards. The Andreyevs took up rock climbing which they regarded as a most Bolshevik pursuit. Even in 1930, Bukharin was often at Zubalovo with his wife and daughter. He brought some of his menagerie of animals—his pet foxes ran around the grounds. Nadya was close to “Bukharchik” and they often walked together. Yenukidze was also a member of this extended family. But there was always business to be done too.

  The children were used to the bodyguards and secretaries: the bodyguards were part of the family. Pauker, the head of the Guards Directorate, and Stalin’s own bodyguard, Nikolai Vlasik, were always there. “Pauker was great fun. He liked children like all Jews and did not have a high opinion of himself but Vlasik strutted around like a stuffed turkey,” says Kira Alliluyeva, Stalin’s niece.

  Karl Pauker, thirty-six, was the children’s favourite, and important to Stalin himself. A symbol of the cosmopolitan culture of the Cheka of that time, this Jewish-Hungarian had been hairdresser at the Budapest Opera before being conscripted into the Austro-Hungarian army, captured by the Russians in 1916 and converted to Bolshevism. He was an accomplished actor, performing accents, especially Jewish ones, for Stalin. Rotund, with his belly held in by a (much-mocked) corset, bald, perfumed, with a scarlet sensuous mouth, this showman loved elaborate OGPU uniforms and pranced around on 1½-inch-heeled boots. He sometimes returned to hairdressing, shaving Stalin like a valet, using talcum powder to fill the pock-marks. The font of delicacies, cars and new products for the Politburo, he kept the secrets of the magnates’ private lives. Said to provide mistresses for Kalinin and Voroshilov, he procured girls for Stalin himself.

  Pauker used to show off his Cadillac, a gift from Stalin, to the children. Long before Stalin officially agreed to bring back the Christmas tree in 1936, Pauker played Father Christmas, delivering presents round the Kremlin and running Christmas parties for the children. The secret policeman as Father Christmas is a symbol of this strange world.22

  The other figure who was never far away was Stalin’s chef de cabinet, Alexander Poskrebyshev, thirty-nine, who scuttled round the garden at Zubalovo delivering the latest paperwork. Small, bald, reddish-haired, this bootmaker’s son from the Urals had trained as a medical nurse, conducting Bolshevik meetings in his surgery. When Stalin found him working in the CC, he told him, “You’ve a fearsome look. You’ll terrify people.” This “narrow-shouldered dwarf ” was “dreadfully ugly,” resembling “a monkey,” but possessed “an excellent memory and was meticulous in his work.” His Special Sector was the heart of Stalin’s power machine. Poskrebyshev prepared and attended Politburos.

  When Stalin exerted his patronage, helping a protégé get an apartment, it was Poskrebyshev who actually did the work: “I ask you to HELP THEM IMMEDIATELY,” Stalin typically wrote to him. “Inform me by letter about quick and exact carrying out of this request.” Lost in the archives until now is Stalin’s correspondence with Poskrebyshev: here we find Stalin teasing his secretary: “I’m receiving English newspapers but not German . . . why? How could it be that you make a mistake? Is it bureaucratism? Greetings. J. Stalin.” Sometimes he was in the doghouse: in 1936, one finds on one of Stalin’s list of things to do: “1. To forgive Poskrebyshev and his friends.”

  The sad, twitchy face of this Quasimodo was a weather vane of the leader’s favour. If he was friendly, you were in favour. If not, he sometimes whispered, “You’re in for it today.” The cognoscenti knew that the best way to get Stalin to read their letter was to address it to Alexander Nikolaievich. At work, Stalin called him Comrade but at home, he was “Sasha” or “the Chief.”

  Poskrebyshev was part buffoon, part monster, but he later suffered grievously at Stalin’s hands. According to his daughter Natalya, he asked if he could study medicine but Stalin made him study economics instead. But in the end, this half-trained nurse pro
vided the only medical care Stalin received.23

  Stalin rose late, at about eleven, took breakfast and worked during the day on his piles of papers, which he carried around wrapped in the newspaper—he did not like briefcases. When he was sleeping, anxious parents begged children to be quiet.

  The big daytime meal was an expansive “brunch” at 3–4 p.m. with all the family and, of course, half the Politburo and their wives. When there were visitors, Stalin played the Georgian host. “He was elaborately hospitable in that Asiatic way,” remembers Leonid Redens, his nephew. “He was very kind to the children.” Whenever Stalin’s brood needed someone to play with, there were their Alliluyev cousins, Pavel’s children, Kira, Sasha and Sergei, and the younger boys of Anna Redens. Then there was the Bolshevik family: Mikoyan’s popular sons, whom Stalin nicknamed the “Mikoyanchiks,” only had to scamper over from next door.

  The children ran around together but Svetlana found there were too many boys and not enough girls to play with. Her brother Vasily bullied her and showed off by telling her sexual stories that she later admitted disturbed and upset her. “Stalin was very loving to Svetlana but he did not really like the boys,” recalls Kira. He invented an imaginary girl named Lelka who was Svetlana’s perfect alter ego. Weak Vasily was already a problem. Nadya understood this and gave him more attention. But Bolshevik parents did not raise their children: they were brought up by nannies and tutors: “It was like an aristocratic family in Victorian times,” says Svetlana. “So were the others, the Kaganoviches, Molotovs, Voroshilovs . . . But the ladies of that top circle were all working so my mother did not dress or feed me. I don’t remember any physical affection from her but she was very fond of my brother. She certainly loved me, I could tell, but she was a disciplinarian.” Once when she cut up a tablecloth, her mother spanked her hard.

  Stalin kissed and squeezed Svetlana with “overflowing Georgian affection” but she claimed later that she did not like his “smell of tobacco and bristly moustache.” Her mother, whose love was so hard to earn, became the untouchable saint in her eyes.

  The Bolsheviks, who believed it was possible to create a Leninist “New Man,” placed stern emphasis on education.30 The magnates were semi-educated autodidacts who never stopped studying, so their children were expected to work hard and grew up much more cultured than their parents, speaking three languages which they had learned from special tutors. (The Stalin and Molotov children shared the same English tutor.)

  The Party did not merely come before family, it was an über-family: when Lenin died, Trotsky said he was “orphaned” and Kaganovich was already calling Stalin “our father.” Stalin lectured Bukharin that “the personal element is . . . not worth a brass farthing. We’re not a family circle or a coterie of close friends—we’re the political party of the working class.” They cultivated their coldness.31 “A Bolshevik should love his work more than his wife,” said Kirov. The Mikoyans were a close Armenian family but Anastas was a “stern, exacting, even severe” father who never forgot he was a Politburo member and a Bolshevik: when he spanked his son, he said in time with the smacks: “It’s not YOU who’s Mikoyan, it’s ME!” Stepan Mikoyan’s mother Ashken “sometimes ‘forgot herself ’ and gave us a hug.” Once at a dinner in the Kremlin, Stalin told Yenukidze, “A true Bolshevik shouldn’t and couldn’t have a family because he should give himself wholly to the Party.” As one veteran put it: “If you have to choose between Party and individual, you choose the Party because the Party has the general aim, the good of many people but one person is just one person.”

  Yet Stalin could be very indulgent to children, giving them rides around the estate in his limousine: “I think ‘Uncle Stalin’ really loved me,” muses Artyom. “I respected him but I didn’t fear him. He managed to make one’s conversation interesting. He always made you formulate your thoughts like an adult.”

  “Let’s play the game of egg breaking—who can break theirs first?” Stalin asked his nephew Leonid when boiled eggs arrived. He entertained the children by throwing orange peel, wine corks into the ice cream or biscuits into their tea. “We children thought this was hilarious,” recalls Vladimir Redens.

  It was the Caucasian tradition to let babies suck wine off the adults’ fingers and when they were older to give them little glasses of wine. Stalin often gave Vasily, and later Svetlana, sips of wine, which seems harmless (though Vasily died of alcoholism) but this infuriated the stern Nadya. They constantly argued about it. When Nadya or her sister told him off, Stalin just chuckled: “Don’t you know it’s medicinal?”

  Once Artyom did something that could have become serious because Stalin was already highly suspicious. “When the leaders were working in the dining room,” young Artyom noticed the soup which, as always, was on the sideboard. The boy crept behind the backs of Stalin, Molotov and Voroshilov and naughtily sprinkled Stalin’s tobacco into the broth. He then waited to see if they would eat it. “Molotov and Voroshilov tried it and found the tobacco. Stalin asked who did it. I said it was me.”

  “Have you tried it?” asked Stalin.

  Artyom shook his head.

  “Well, it’s delicious,” replied Stalin. “You try it and if you like it, you can go and tell Carolina Vasilevna [Til, the housekeeper] to always put tobacco in the soup. If not, you better not do it again.”

  The children were aware that it was a political household. “We looked at everything with humour and irony,” says Leonid Redens. “When Stalin dismissed a commissar, we regarded it with amusement.” This was a joke that would not remain funny for long.24

  This country set knew about the unspeakable depredations in the countryside. Stanislas Redens, Stalin and Nadya’s brother-in-law, was the GPU boss of the Ukraine, at the centre of the famine, a job that entailed intimate knowledge and participation: there is no doubt that his wife talked to Nadya about the Ukraine’s tragedy. Soon it had poisoned not only Stalin’s marriage but the Bolshevik family itself.

  5

  Holidays and Hell: The Politburo at the Seaside

  In late 1931, Stalin, Nadya and most of the magnates were already on holiday as the hunger turned to famine. They took their holidays very seriously. Indeed, at least ten percent of the letters between Stalin’s circle, even during the worst years of famine, concerned their holidays. (Another twenty percent concerned their health.) Networking on holiday was the best way to get to know Stalin: more careers were made, more intrigues clinched, on those sunny verandas than on the snowy battlements of the Kremlin.32

  There was a fixed ritual for taking these holidays: the question was formally put to the Politburo “to propose to Comrade Stalin one week’s holiday” but by the late twenties, the holidays had expanded from “twenty days” to one or two months “on the suggestion of doctors.” Once the dates were arranged, Stalin’s secretary sent a memorandum to Yagoda, giving him the schedule “so bodyguards can be arranged appropriately.”1

  The potentates set off in private trains, guarded by OGPU troops, southwards to the Soviet Riviera—the Politburo’s southern dachas and sanatoria were spread from the Crimea in the west to the Georgian spa of Borzhomi in the east. Molotov preferred the Crimea but Stalin favoured the steamy Black Sea coastline that ran from Sochi down into the semi-tropical towns of Sukhumi and Gagra in Abkhazia. All were state-owned but it was understood that whoever supervised their building had preferential rights to use them.

  The magnates moved about to visit one another, asking permission so as not to wreck anyone else’s holiday, but naturally they tended to cluster around Stalin. “Stalin would like to come to Mukhalatka [in the Crimea]33 but does not want to disturb anyone else. Ask Yagoda to organize bodyguards . . .”2

  There was a dark side to their holidays. The OGPU carefully planned Stalin’s train journey which, during the Hunger, was accompanied by a train of provisions. If, on arrival, the staff thought there was still a shortage of food for Stalin and his guests, his assistants rapidly sent “a telegram to Orel and Kursk” to de
spatch more. They eagerly reported that during the journey they had successfully cooked Stalin hot meals. “As for the GPU,” wrote one of his assistants, “there’s lots of work, massive arrests have taken place” and they were still working on hunting down “those who remain . . . Two bands of bandits have been arrested.” 3

  Stalin’s tastes in holiday houses changed but in the thirties, Dacha No. 9 in Sochi was his favourite. Krasnaya Polyana, Red Meadow, was “a wooden house with a veranda around the whole outside,” says Artyom, who usually holidayed with “Uncle Stalin.”34 Stalin’s house stood high on the hill while Molotov and Voroshilov’s houses stood symbolically in the valley below. When Nadya was on holiday with her husband, they usually invited a wider family, including Yenukidze and the obese proletarian poet, Demian Bedny. It was the job of Stalin’s staff, along with the secret police and the local bosses, to prepare the house before his arrival: “The villa . . . has been renovated 100%,” wrote one of his staff, “as if ready for a great party” with every imaginable fruit.4

  They enjoyed holidaying in groups, like an American university fraternity house, often without their wives who were with the children in Moscow. “Molotov and I ride horses, play tennis, skittles, boating, shooting—in a word, a perfect rest,” wrote Mikoyan to his wife, listing the others who were with them. “It’s a male Bolshevik monastery.” But at other times they took their wives and children too: when Kuibyshev went on holiday, the shock-haired economics boss and poet travelled round the Black Sea with a “large and jolly troupe” of pretty girls and bon vivants.5