Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  “We’ll settle this question the routine way,” Stalin angrily ended the meeting, appointing Beria Georgian First Secretary and Second Secretary of Transcaucasia over their heads. Beria had arrived. 8

  In Ukraine, Fred Beal wandered through villages where no one was left alive and found heartbreaking messages scrawled beside the bodies: “God bless those who enter here, may they never suffer as we have,” wrote one. Another read: “My son. We couldn’t wait. God be with you.”

  Kaganovich, patrolling the Ukraine, was unmoved. He was more outraged by the sissy leaders there: “Hello dear Valerian,” he wrote warmly to Kuibyshev, “We’re working a lot on the question of grain preparation . . . We had to criticize the regions a lot, especially Ukraine. Their mood, particularly that of Chubar, is very bad . . . I reprimanded the regions.” But in the midst of this wasteland of death, Kaganovich was not going to spoil anyone’s holidays: “How are you feeling? Where are you planning to go for vacation? Don’t think I’m going to call you back before finishing your holidays . . .”9

  After a final meeting with Kaganovich and Sergo in his office on 29 May 1932, Stalin and Nadya left for Sochi. Lakoba and Beria visited them but the latter now had his access to Stalin. He ditched his patron, Lakoba, who muttered in Beria’s hearing, “What a vile person.” 10

  We do not know how Stalin and Nadya got on during this holiday but, day by day, the pressure ratcheted up. Stalin governed a country on the edge of rebellion by correspondence, receiving the bad news in heaps of GPU reports—and the doubts of his friends.44 While Kaganovich suppressed the rebellious textile workers of Ivanovo, Voroshilov was unhappy and sent Stalin a remarkable letter: “Across the Stavropol region, I saw all the fields uncultivated. We were expecting a good harvest but didn’t get it . . . Across the Ukraine from my train window, the truth is it looks even less cultivated than the North Caucasus . . .” Voroshilov finished his note: “Sorry to tell you such things during your holiday but I can’t be silent.”11

  Stalin later told Churchill this was the most difficult time of his life, harder even than Hitler’s invasion: “it was a terrible struggle” in which he had to destroy “ten million [kulaks]. It was fearful. Four years it lasted. It was absolutely necessary . . . It was no use arguing with them. A certain number of them had been resettled in the northern parts of the country . . . Others had been slaughtered by the peasants themselves—such had been the hatred for them.”12

  The peasants understandably attacked Communist officials. Sitting on the terrace of the Sochi dacha in the baking heat, an angry, defensive Stalin seethed about the breakdown of discipline and betrayal in the Party. At times like this, he seemed to retreat into a closed melodramatic fortress surrounded by enemies. On 14 July, he put pen to paper ordering Molotov and Kaganovich in Moscow to create a draconian law to shoot hungry peasants who stole even husks of grain. They drew up the notorious decree against “misappropriation of socialist property” with grievous punishments “based on the text of your letter.”45 On 7 August, this became law. Stalin was now in a state of nervous panic, writing to Kaganovich: “If we don’t make an effort now to improve the situation in Ukraine, we may lose Ukraine.” Stalin blamed the weakness and naïvety of his brother-in-law, Redens, Ukrainian GPU chief, and the local boss Kosior. The place “was riddled with Polish agents,” who “are many times stronger than Redens or Kosior think.” He had Redens replaced with someone tougher.

  Nadya returned early to Moscow, perhaps to study, perhaps because the tension in Sochi was unbearable. Her headaches and abdominal pains worsened. This in turn can only have added to Stalin’s anxieties but his nerves were so much stronger. Her letters do not survive: perhaps he destroyed them, perhaps she did not write any, but we know she had been influenced against the campaign: “she was easily swayed by Bukharin and Yenukidze.”

  Voroshilov crossed Stalin, suggesting that his policies could have been resisted by a concerted effort of the Politburo. When a Ukrainian comrade named Korneiev shot a (possibly starving) thief and was arrested, Stalin thought he should not be punished. But Voroshilov, an unlikely moral champion, looked into the case, discovered the victim was a teenager and wrote to Stalin to support Korneiev’s sentence, even if he only served a short jail term. The day he received Klim’s letter, 15 August, Stalin angrily overruled Voroshilov, freed Korneiev, and promoted him.13

  Six days after Voroshilov’s stand, on 21 August, Riutin, who earlier had been arrested for criticizing Stalin, met with some comrades to agree on their “Appeal to All Party Members,” a devastating manifesto for his deposition. Within days, Riutin had been denounced to the GPU. Riutin’s opposition, so soon after the Syrtsov–Lominadze affair and Voroshilov’s waverings, rattled Stalin. On 27 August, he was back in the Kremlin meeting Kaganovich. Perhaps he also returned to join Nadya.14

  Whatever the ghastly situation in the country, her health alone would have been enough to undermine the morale of a strong person. She was terribly ill, suffering “acute pains in the abdominal region” with the doctor adding on her notes: “Return for further examination.” This was caused not just by psychosomatic tension due to the crisis but also by the after-math of the 1926 abortion.

  On 31 August, Nadya was examined again: did Stalin accompany her to the Kremlevka clinic? He had only two appointments, at 4 p.m. and 9 p.m., as if his day had been deliberately left open. The doctors noted: “Examination to consider operation in 3–4 weeks’ time.” Was this for her abdomen or her head? Yet they did not operate.15

  On 30 September, Riutin was arrested. It is possible that Stalin, supported by Kaganovich, demanded the death penalty for Riutin but the execution of a comrade—a fellow “sword-bearer”—was a dangerous step, resisted by Sergo and Kirov. There is no evidence that it was ever formally discussed—Kirov did not attend Politburo sessions in late September and October. Besides, Stalin would not have proposed such a measure without first canvassing Sergo and Kirov, just as he had in the case of Tukhachevsky in 1930. He probably never proposed it specifically. On 11 October, Riutin was sentenced to ten years in the camps.

  Riutin’s “Platform” touched Stalin’s home. According to the bodyguard Vlasik, Nadya procured a copy of the Riutin document from her friends at the Academy and showed it to Stalin. This does not mean she joined the opposition but it sounds aggressive, though she might also have been trying to be helpful. Later it was found in her room. In the fifties, Stalin admitted that he had not paid her enough attention during those final months: “There was so much pressure on me . . . so many Enemies. We had to work day and night...”16 Perhaps literary matters proved a welcome distraction.

  7

  Stalin the Intellectual

  On 26 October 1932, a chosen élite of fifty writers were mysteriously invited to the art deco mansion of Russia’s greatest living novelist, Maxim Gorky.46 The tall, haggard writer with the grizzled moustache, now sixty-four, met the guests on the stairway. The dining room was filled with tables covered in smart white cloths. They waited in excited anticipation. Then Stalin arrived with Molotov, Voroshilov and Kaganovich. The Party took literature so seriously that the magnates personally edited the work of prominent writers. After some small talk, Stalin and his comrades sat down at the end table near Gorky himself. Stalin stopped smiling and started to talk about the creation of a new literature.

  It was a momentous occasion: Stalin and Gorky were the two most famous men in Russia, their relationship a barometer of Soviet literature itself. Ever since the late twenties, Gorky had been so close to Stalin that he had holidayed with Stalin and Nadya.1 Born Maxim Peshkov in 1868, he had used his own bitter (hence his nom de plume, Gorky) experiences as an orphaned street Arab, who had survived “vile abominations” living on scraps among outcasts in peasant villages, to write masterpieces that inspired the Revolution. But in 1921, disillusioned with Lenin’s dictatorship, he went into exile in a villa in Sorrento, Italy. Stalin put out feelers to lure him back. Meanwhile Stalin had placed Soviet literature u
nder RAPP (the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers), “the literary wing of Stalin’s Five-Year Plan for industry,” which harassed and attacked any writers who did not depict the Great Turn with ecstatic enthusiasm. Gorky and Stalin began a complex pas de deux in which vanity, money and power played their role in encouraging the writer to return. Gorky’s experience of the savage backwardness of the peasantry made him support Stalin’s war on the villages but he found the standard of RAPP literature to be dire. By 1930, Gorky’s life was already oiled with generous gifts from the GPU. 2

  Stalin concentrated his feline charms on Gorky.47 In 1931, he returned to become Stalin’s literary ornament, granted a large allowance as well as the millions he made from his books. He lived in the mansion in Moscow that had belonged to the tycoon Ryabushinsky, a large dacha outside the capital and a palatial villa in the Crimea along with numerous staff, all GPU agents. Gorky’s houses became the headquarters of the intelligentsia where he helped brilliant young writers like Isaac Babel and Vasily Grossman.

  The magnates embraced Gorky as their own literary celebrity while the Chekist Yagoda took over the details of running Gorky’s household, spending more and more time there himself. Stalin took his children to see Gorky where they played with his grandchildren; Mikoyan brought his sons to play with Gorky’s pet monkey. Voroshilov came for sing-songs. Gorky’s granddaugher Martha played with Babel one day; Yagoda the next.

  Stalin liked him: “Gorky was here,” he wrote to Voroshilov in an undated note. “We talked about things. A good, clever, friendly person. He’s fond of our policy. He understands everything . . . In politics he’s with us against the Right.” But he was also aware of Gorky as an asset who could be bought. In 1932, Stalin ordered the celebration of Gorky’s forty literary years. His home town, Nizhny Novgorod, was renamed after him. So was Moscow’s main street, Tverskaya. When Stalin named the Moscow Art Theatre after the writer, the literary bureaucrat Ivan Gronsky retorted: “But Comrade Stalin, the Moscow Art Theatre is really more associated with Chekhov.”

  “That doesn’t matter. Gorky’s a vain man. We must bind him with cables to the Party,” replied Stalin.3 It worked: during the kulak liquidation, Gorky unleashed his hatred of the backward peasants in Pravda: “If the enemy does not surrender, he must be exterminated.” He toured concentration camps and admired their re-educational value. He supported slave labour projects such as the Belomor Canal which he visited with Yagoda, whom he congratulated: “You rough fellows do not realize what great work you’re doing!”4

  Yagoda, the dominant secret policeman, followed in Stalin’s wake. “The first generation of young Chekists . . . was distinguished by its sophisticated tastes and weakness for literature,” wrote Nadezhda Mandelstam. “The Chekists were the avant-garde of the New People.” The grand seigneur of this avant-garde was Yagoda, thirty-nine, who now fell in love with Gorky’s daughter-in-law, Timosha; she was “young, very beautiful, merry, simple, delightful” and married to Max Peshkov.

  Son of a jeweller, trained as a statistician and learning pharmacy as a chemist’s assistant, Genrikh Yagoda (his real first name was Enoch), who had joined the Party in 1907, was also from Nizhny Novgorod, which gave him his calling card. “Superior to” the creatures that followed him, according to Anna Larina, Yagoda became “a corrupt . . . careerist,” but he was never Stalin’s man. He had been closer to the Rightists but swapped sides in 1929. His great achievement, supported by Stalin, was the creation by slave labour of the vast economic empire of the Gulags. Yagoda himself was devious, short and balding, always in full uniform, with a taste for French wines and sex toys: another green-fingered killer, he boasted that his huge dacha bloomed with “2000 orchids and roses,” while spending almost four million roubles decorating his residences.48 He frequented Gorky’s houses, courting Timosha with bouquets of his orchids. 5 Gorky was appointed head of the Writers’ Union and advised Stalin to scrap the RAPP, which was abolished in April 1932, causing both delight and confusion among the intelligentsia, who eagerly hoped for some improvement. Then came this invitation.

  Playing ominously with a pearl-handled penknife and now suddenly “stern,” with a “taste of iron” in his voice, Stalin proposed: “The artist ought to show life truthfully. And if he shows our life truthfully he cannot fail to show it moving to socialism. This is, and will be, Socialist Realism.” In other words, the writers had to describe what life should be, a panegyric to the Utopian future, not what life was. Then there was a touch of farce, as usual provided unconsciously by Voroshilov: “You produce the goods that we need,” said Stalin. “Even more than machines, tanks, aeroplanes, we need human souls.” But Voroshilov, ever the simpleton, took this literally and interrupted Stalin to object that tanks were also “very important.”

  The writers, Stalin declared, were “engineers of human souls,” a striking phrase of boldness and crudity—and he jabbed a finger at those sitting closest to him.

  “Me? Why me?” retorted the nearest writer. “I’m not arguing.”

  “What’s the good of just not arguing?” interrupted Voroshilov again. “You have to get on with it.” By now, some of the writers were drunk on Gorky’s wine and the heady aroma of power. Stalin filled their glasses. Alexander Fadeev, the drunken novelist and most notorious of literary bureaucrats, asked Stalin’s favourite Cossack novelist, Mikhail Sholokhov, to sing. The writers clinked glasses with Stalin.

  “Let’s drink to the health of Comrade Stalin,” called out the poet Lugovskoi. The novelist Nikoforov jumped up and said: “I’m fed up with this! We’ve drunk Stalin’s health one million one hundred and forty-seven thousand times. He’s probably fed up with it himself . . .”

  There was silence. But Stalin shook Nikoforov’s hand: “Thank you, Nikoforov, thank you. I am fed up with it.”6

  Nonetheless Stalin never tired of dealing with writers. Mandelstam was right when he mused that poetry was more respected in Russia, where “people are killed for it,” than anywhere else. Literature mattered greatly to Stalin. He may have demanded “engineers of the human soul” but he was himself far from the oafish philistine which his manners would suggest. He not only admired and appreciated great literature, he discerned the difference between hackery and genius. Ever since the seminary in the 1890s, he had read voraciously, claiming a rate of five hundred pages daily: in exile, when a fellow prisoner died, Stalin purloined his library and refused to share it with his outraged comrades. His hunger for literary knowledge was almost as driving as his Marxist faith and megalomania: one might say these were the ruling passions of his life. He did not possess literary talents himself but in terms of his reading alone, he was an intellectual, despite being the son of a cobbler and a washerwoman. Indeed, it would be no exaggeration to say that Stalin was the best-read ruler of Russia from Catherine the Great up to Vladimir Putin, even including Lenin who was no mean intellectual himself and had enjoyed the benefits of a nobleman’s education.

  “He worked very hard to improve himself,” said Molotov. His library consisted of 20,000 well-used volumes. “If you want to know the people around you,” Stalin said, “find out what they read.” Svetlana found books there from the Life of Jesus to the novels of Galsworthy,49 Wilde, Maupassant and later Steinbeck and Hemingway. His granddaughter later noticed him reading Gogol, Chekhov, Hugo, Thackeray and Balzac. In old age, he was still discovering Goethe. He “worshipped Zola.”

  The Bolsheviks, who believed in the perfectibility of the New Man, were avid autodidacts, Stalin being the most accomplished and diligent of all. He read seriously, making notes, learning quotations, like an omnipotent student, leaving his revealing marginalia in books varying from Anatole France to Vipper’s History of Ancient Greece. He had “a very good knowledge of antiquity and mythology,” recalled Molotov. He could quote from the Bible, Chekhov and Good Soldier Svejk, as well as Napoleon, Bismarck and Talleyrand. His knowledge of Georgian literature was such that he debated arcane poetry with Shalva Nutsibidze, the philosopher,
who said, long after Stalin was no longer a god, that his editorial comments were outstanding. He read literature aloud to his circle—usually Saltykov-Shchedrin or a new edition of the medieval Georgian epic poem by Rustaveli, The Knight in the Panther Skin. He adored The Last of the Mohicans, amazing a young translator whom he greeted in faux–Red Indian: “Big chief greets paleface!”

  His deeply conservative tastes remained nineteenth century even during the Modernist blossoming of the twenties: he was always much happier with Pushkin and Tchaikovsky than with Akhmatova and Shostakovich. He respected intellectuals, his tone changing completely when dealing with a famous professor. “I’m very sorry that I’m unable to satisfy your request now, illustrious Nikolai Yakovlevich,” he wrote to the linguistics professor Marr. “After the conference, I’ll be able to give us 40–50 minutes if you’ll agree . . .”

  Stalin could certainly appreciate genius, but as with love and family, his belief in Marxist progress was brutally paramount. He admired that “great psychologist” Dostoevsky but banned him because he was “bad for young people.” He enjoyed the satires of the Leningrad satirist Mikhail Zoshchenko so much, even though they mocked Soviet bureaucrats, he used to read extracts to his two boys, Vasily and Artyom, and would laugh at the end: “Here is where Comrade Zoshchenko remembered the GPU and changed the ending!”—a joke typical of his brutal cynicism crossed with dry gallows humour. He recognized that Mandelstam, Pasternak and Bulgakov were geniuses, but their work was suppressed. Yet he could tolerate whimsical maestros: Bulgakov and Pasternak were never arrested. But woe betide anyone, genius or hack, who insulted the person or policy of Stalin—for the two were synonymous.

  His comments are most fascinating when he was dealing with a master like Bulgakov whose Civil War play, Days of the Turbins, based on his novel The White Guard, was Stalin’s favourite: he saw it fifteen times. When Bulgakov’s play Flight was attacked as “anti-Soviet and Rightist,” Stalin wrote to the theatre director: “It’s not good calling literature Right and Left. These are Party words. In literature, use class, anti-Soviet, revolutionary or anti-revolutionary but not Right or Left . . . If Bulgakov would add to the eight dreams, one or two where he would discover the international social content of the Civil War, the spectator would understand that the honest “Serafima” and the professor were thrown away from Russia, not by the caprice of Bolsheviks, but because they lived on the necks of the people. It’s easy to criticize Days of the Turbins—it’s easy to reject but it’s hardest to write good plays. The final impression of the play is good for Bolshevism.” When Bulgakov was not allowed to work, he appealed to Stalin who telephoned him to say, “We’ll try to do something for you.”