Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  Stalin’s gift, apart from his catechismic rhythms of question and answer, was the ability to reduce complex problems to lucid simplicity, a talent that is invaluable in a politician. He could draft, usually in his own hand, a diplomatic telegram, speech or article straight off in the clearest, yet often subtle prose (as he showed during the war)—but he was also capable of clumsy crudity, though partly this reflected his self-conscious proletarian machismo.

  Stalin was not just supreme censor; he relished his role as imperial editor-in-chief,50 endlessly tinkering with other men’s prose, loving nothing more than scribbling the expression that covers the pages of his library—that mirthless chuckle: “Ha-ha-ha!” 7

  Stalin’s sneering did not help Nadya whose depression, stoked by caffeine and Stalin’s own stress, worsened. Yet there were also moments of touching tenderness: Nadya took an unaccustomed drink which made her sick. Stalin put her to bed and she looked up at him and said pathetically, “So you love me a little after all.” Years later, Stalin recounted this to his daughter.

  At Zubalovo for the weekend, Nadya, who never gave Svetlana a word of praise, warned her to refuse if Stalin offered her wine: “Don’t take the alcohol!” If Nadya was taking Stalin’s small indulgence of his children as a grave sin, one can only imagine how desperately she felt about his brusqueness, never mind the tragedy of the peasants. During those last days, Nadya visited her brother Pavel and his wife Zhenya, who had just returned from Berlin, in their apartment in the House on the Embankment: “She said hello to me in the coldest way,” their daughter Kira noticed, but then Nadya was a stern woman. Nadya spent some evenings working on designs with Dora Khazan, whispering in the bedroom of the latter’s daughter, Natalya Andreyeva.

  So we are left with a troubling picture of a husband and wife who alternated between loving kindness and vicious explosions of rage, parents who treated the children differently. Both were given to humiliating one another in public, yet Nadya still seemed to have loved “my man,” as she called him. It was a tense time but there was one difference between this highly strung, thin-skinned couple. Stalin was crushingly strong, as Nadya told his mother: “I can say that I marvel at his strength and his energy. Only a really healthy man could stand the amount of work he gets through.” She on the other hand was weak. If one was to break, it was she. His stunted emotional involvement allowed him to weather the hardest blows.

  Kaganovich again headed out of his Moscow fiefdom to crush dissent in the Kuban, ordering mass reprisals against the Cossacks and deporting fifteen villages to Siberia. Kaganovich called this “the resistance of the last remnants of the dying classes leading to a concrete form of the class struggle.” The classes were dying all right. Kopelev saw “women and children with distended bellies, turning blue, still breathing but with vacant lifeless eyes. And corpses—corpses in ragged sheepskin coats and cheap felt boots; corpses in peasant huts, in the melting snow of old Vologda, under the bridges of Kharkov.” “Iron Lazar” arranged an array of executions of grain hoarders and was back in time for the fatal holiday dinner for the anniversary of the Revolution.

  On 7 November, the potentates took the salute from atop Lenin’s newly completed grey marble Mausoleum. They gathered early in Stalin’s apartment in their greatcoats and hats for it was below freezing. Nadya was already taking her place in the parade as a delegate of the Academy. The housekeeper and nannies made sure Vasily and Artyom were dressed and ready; Svetlana was still at the dacha.

  Just before 8 a.m., the leaders walked chatting out of the Poteshny Palace across the central square, past the Yellow Palace towards the steps that led up to the Mausoleum. It was bitterly cold up there; the parade lasted four hours.51 Voroshilov and Budyonny waited on horseback at different Kremlin gates. As the Spassky Tower, Moscow’s equivalent of Big Ben, tolled, they trotted out to meet in the middle in front of the Mausoleum, then dismounted to join the leadership.

  Many people saw Nadya that day. She did not seem either depressed or unhappy with Stalin. She marched past, raising her oval face towards the leaders. Afterwards she met up with Vasily and Artyom on the tribune to the right of the Mausoleum, and bumped into Khrushchev, whom she had introduced to Stalin. She looked up at her husband in his greatcoat, but like any wife, she worried that Stalin’s coat was open: “My man didn’t take his scarf. He’ll catch cold and get sick,” she said—but suddenly she was struck with one of her agonizing headaches. “She started moaning, ‘Oh my headache!’ ” remembers Artyom. After the parade, the boys requested the housekeeper to ask Nadya if they could spend the holiday at Zubalovo. It was easier to persuade the housekeeper than tackle the severe mother.

  “Let them go to the dacha,” Nadya replied, adding cheerfully, “I’ll soon graduate from the Academy and then there’ll be a real holiday for everyone!” She winced. “Oh! My headache!” Stalin, Voroshilov and others were carousing in the little room behind the Mausoleum where there was always a buffet.

  Next morning the boys were driven off to Zubalovo. Stalin worked as usual in his office, meeting Molotov, Kuibyshev and CC Secretary Pavel Postyshev. Yagoda showed them the transcripts of another anti-Stalin meeting of the Old Bolsheviks, Smirnov and Eismont, one of whom had said, “Don’t tell me there’s nobody in this whole country capable of removing him.” They ordered their arrest, then they walked over to the Voroshilovs’ for dinner. Nadya too was on her way there. She looked her best.8

  Some time in the early hours, Nadya took the Mauser pistol that her brother Pavel had given her and lay on the bed in her room. Suicide was a Bolshevik death: she had attended the funeral of Adolf Yoffe, the Trotskyite who protested against Stalin’s defeat of the oppositions by shooting himself in 1929. In 1930, the Modernist poet Mayakovsky also made that supreme protest. She raised the pistol to her breast and pulled the trigger once. No one heard the voice of that tiny feminine weapon; Kremlin walls are thick. Her body rolled off the bed onto the floor.9

  PART TWO

  The Jolly Fellows: Stalin and Kirov 1932–1934

  8

  The Funeral

  Nadya died instantly. Hours later, Stalin stood in the dining room absorbing the news. He asked his sister-in-law Zhenya Alliluyeva “what was missing in him.” The family were shocked when he threatened suicide, something they “had never heard before.” He grieved in his room for days: Zhenya and Pavel decided to stay with him to make sure he did not harm himself. He could not understand why it had happened, raging what did it mean? Why had such a terrible stab in the back been dealt to him of all people? “He was too intelligent not to know that people always commit suicide in order to punish someone . . .” wrote his daughter Svetlana, so he kept asking whether it was true he had been inconsiderate, hadn’t he loved her? “I was a bad husband,” he confessed to Molotov. “I had no time to take her to the cinema.” He told Vlasik, “She’s completely overturned my life!” He stared sadly at Pavel, growling, “That was a hell of a nice present you gave her! A pistol!”

  Around 1 p.m., Professor Kushner and a colleague examined the body of Nadezhda Stalin in her little bedroom. “The position of the body,” the professor scrawled on a piece of squared paper ripped from one of the children’s exercise books, “was that her head is on the pillow turned to the right side. Near the pillow on the bed is a little gun.” The housekeeper must have replaced the gun on the bed. “The face is absolutely tranquil, the eyes semi-closed, semi-open. On the right part of face and neck, there are blue and red marks and blood . . .” There were bruises on her face: did Stalin really have something to hide? Had he returned to the apartment, quarrelled with her, hit her and then shot her? Given his murderous pedigree, one more death is not impossible. Yet the bruise could have been caused by falling off the bed. No one with any knowledge of that night has ever suggested that Stalin killed her. But he was certainly aware that his enemies would whisper that he had.

  “There is a five-millimetre hole over the heart—an open hole,” noted the Professor. “Conclusion—deat
h was immediate from an open wound to the heart.” This scrap of paper, which one can now see in the State Archive, was not to be seen again for six decades.

  Molotov, Kaganovich and Sergo came and went, deciding what to do: as usual in such moments, the Bolshevik instinct was to lie and cover up, even though in this case if they had been more open, they might have avoided the most damaging slanders. It was clear enough that Nadya had committed suicide but Molotov, Kaganovich and her godfather Yenukidze got Stalin’s agreement that this self-destruction could not be announced publicly. It would be taken as a political protest. They would announce she had died of appendicitis. The doctors, a profession whose Hippocratic oath was to be as undermined by the Bolsheviks as by the Nazis, signed the lie. Servants were informed that Stalin had been at his dacha with Molotov and Kalinin—but unsurprisingly, they gossiped dangerously.

  Yenukidze drafted the announcement of her death and then wrote a letter of condolence, to be published next day in Pravda, signed by all the leaders’ wives and then the leaders themselves, starting with Nadya’s four greatest friends—Ekaterina Voroshilova, Polina Molotova, Dora Khazan and Maria Kaganovich: “Our close friend, a person with a wonderful soul . . . young, vigorous and devoted to the Bolshevik Party and the Revolution.” Even this death was seen by these singular dogmatists in terms of Bolshevism. 1

  Since Stalin was barely functioning, Yenukidze and the magnates debated how to arrange this unique funeral. The Bolshevik funeral ritual combined elements of Tsarist funeral tradition with its own idiosyncratic culture. The deceased were beautified by the finest morticians, usually the professors in charge of Lenin’s cadaver, then lay in state, snowy faces often heavily rouged, among the surreal mise-en-scène of lush tropical palms, bouquets, red banners, all unnaturally illuminated with arc lights. The Politburo bore the open coffin to, and from, the Hall of Columns where they also stood guard like knights of old. The rigorous eminence was then cremated and a plangent military funeral was held, with the Politburo again bearing an elaborate catafalque enclosing the urn of ashes which they placed in the Kremlin Wall. But Stalin himself must have demanded an old-fashioned funeral.

  Yenukidze presided over the Funeral Commission with Dora Khazan, Andreyev’s wife, and Pauker, the Chekist who was so close to Stalin. They met first thing next morning and decided on the procession, the place of burial, the guard of honour. Pauker, the theatrical expert—ex-coiffeur of the Budapest Opera—was in charge of the orchestras: there were to be two, a military one and a theatrical one of fifty instruments.2

  Stalin could not speak himself. He asked Kaganovich, the Politburo’s best speaker, to give the oration. Even that energetic bulldozer of a man, fresh from shooting droves of innocent Kuban Cossacks, was daunted by the burden of giving such a speech in front of Stalin himself, but as with so many other macabre chores, “Stalin asked and I did it.” 3

  The death of Nadya from appendicitis was broken to the children out at Zubalovo: Artyom was distraught but Vasily never recovered. Svetlana, six, did not grasp this finality. Voroshilov, who was so kind in all matters outside politics, visited her but could not talk for weeping. The older children were driven to Moscow. Svetlana remained in the country until the funeral.

  When the body was removed from the apartment, some time on the morning of the 10th, a little girl in the Horse Guards, opposite Stalin’s Poteshny Palace, sat glued to the window of her apartment. Natalya Andreyeva, daughter of Andreyev and Dora Khazan who was managing the funeral with Yenukidze, watched as a group of men carried down the coffin. Stalin walked beside it, wearing no gloves in the freezing cold, clutching at the side of the coffin with tears running down his cheeks.4 The body must have been taken to the Kremlevka to cover up the bruises.

  The schoolboys, Vasily Stalin and Artyom, arrived at Stalin’s flat where Pavel, Zhenya and Nadya’s sister Anna, took turns watching over the widower who remained in his room and would not come out for dinner. The gloomy apartment was pervaded by whispers: Artyom’s mother arrived and foolishly told her son the spellbinding truth about the suicide. Artyom rashly asked the housekeeper about it. Both he and his mother were reprimanded. “The things I saw in that house!” recalls Artyom.

  During the night, the body was delivered to the Hall of Columns close to Red Square and the Kremlin. It was to be the scene of some of the great dramas and lying-in-states of Stalin’s rule. At eight the next morning, Yagoda joined the Funeral Commission.

  The three smaller children were taken to the hall where Nadezhda Alliluyeva Stalin lay in an open casket, her round face surrounded by bouquets, her bruises exquisitely powdered and rouged away by Moscow’s macabre maestros. “She was very beautiful in her coffin, very young, her face clear and lovely,” recalls her niece Kira Alliluyeva. Zina Ordzhonikidze, the plump half-Yakut wife of the irrepressible Sergo, took Svetlana’s hand and led her up to the coffin. She cried and they rushed her out. Yenukidze comforted her, despatching her back to Zubalovo. She only learned of the suicide a decade later, incongruously from the Illustrated London News.

  Stalin arrived accompanied by the Politburo, who stood guard around the catafalque, a duty to which they were to grow accustomed in the deadly years ahead. Stalin was weeping. Vasily left Artyom and ran forward towards Stalin and “hung on to his father, saying, ‘Papa don’t cry!’ ” To a chorus of sobs from Nadya’s family and the hardmen of the Politburo and Cheka, the Vozhd approached the coffin with Vasily holding on to him. Stalin looked down at this woman who had loved, hated, punished and rejected him. “I’d never seen Stalin cry before,” said Molotov, “but as he stood there beside the coffin, the tears ran down his cheeks.”

  “She left me like an enemy,” Stalin said bitterly but then Molotov heard him say: “I didn’t save you.” They were about to nail down the coffin when Stalin suddenly stopped them. To everyone’s surprise, he leaned down, lifted Nadya’s head and began to kiss her ardently. This provoked more weeping.

  The coffin was carried out into Red Square where it was laid on a black funeral carriage with four little onion domes on each corner holding an intricate canopy, a cortège that seemed to belong in Tsarist times. There was an honour guard marching around it and the streets were lined with soldiers. Six grooms in black led six horses and ahead, a military brass band played the funeral march. Bukharin, who was close to Nadya but had tainted her politically, offered his condolences to Stalin. The widower insisted strangely that he had gone to the dacha after the banquet; he was not in the apartment. The death was nothing to do with him. So Stalin propagated an alibi.

  The procession set off through the streets, the public held far back by police. Here was the first of many funerals in which the cause of death was concealed from most of the mourners. Stalin walked between Molotov and the shrewd, hawk-eyed Armenian Mikoyan, themselves flanked by Kaganovich and Voroshilov. Pauker, resplendent in his uniform, belly buttressed by his invisible corset, kept pace to the side. Vasily and Artyom walked behind them along with the family, the cream of the Bolshevik movement and delegates from Nadya’s Academy.

  Her mother Olga blamed Nadya: “How could you do this?” she addressed her absent daughter. “How could you leave the children?” Most of the family and leaders agreed, and sympathized with Stalin.

  “Nadya was wrong,” declared the forthright Polina. “She left him at such a difficult time.”

  Artyom and Vasily fell behind the band and lost sight of Stalin. It has variously been claimed that Stalin either did not go to the funeral or that he walked all the way to the Novodevichy Cemetery. Neither is true. Yagoda insisted that it was not safe for Stalin to walk the whole route. When the procession reached Manege Square, Stalin, along with the deceased’s mother, were driven to the cemetery.

  At Novodevichy, Stalin stood on one side of the grave, and the two boys, Vasily and Artyom, watched him from the other. Bukharin spoke, then Yenukidze announced the main speaker: “It was so difficult,” Kaganovich remembered, “with Stalin there.” The Iron Commissar, mo
re used to tub-thumping broadsides, delivered his oration in that special Bolshevik language: “Comrades, we are at the funeral of one of our best members of our Party. She grew up in the family of a Bolshevik worker . . . organically connected with our Party . . . she was the devoted friend of those who ruled . . . fighting the great struggle. She distinguished herself by the best features of a Bolshevik—firmness, toughness in the struggle . . .” Then he turned to the Vozhd: “We’re close friends and comrades of Comrade Stalin. We understand the weight of Comrade Stalin’s loss ... We understand we must share the burdens of Comrade Stalin’s loss.”

  Stalin picked up a handful of soil and threw it onto the coffin. Artyom and Vasily were asked to do the same. Artyom asked why it was necessary. “So she can have some earth from your hand,” he was told. Later Stalin chose the monument that rested over her grave, with a rose to remember the one she wore in her hair and proudly emblazoned with the sacred words: “Member of the Bolshevik Party.” For the rest of his life, Stalin ruminated on her death. “Oh Nadya, Nadya, what did you do?” he mused in his old age, excusing himself: “There was always so much pressure on me.” The suicide of a spouse usually affects the surviving partner, often leaving the bitter taste of guilt, betrayal and, above all, desertion. Nadya’s abandonment of Stalin wounded and humiliated him, breaking one more of his meagre ties to human sympathy, redoubling his brutality, jealousy, coldness and self-pity. But the political challenges of 1932, particularly what Stalin regarded as betrayals by some of his comrades, also played their part.