Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  “After 1932,” Kaganovich observed, “Stalin changed.” 5

  The family watched over Stalin, letting themselves into the apartment in case he needed anything. One night, Zhenya Alliluyeva visited him but there was no sound. Then she heard an ugly screeching and found the Vozhd lying on a sofa in the half-light, spitting on the wall. She knew he had been there a very long time because the wall was dripping with glistening trails of spit.

  “What on earth are you doing, Joseph?” she asked him. “You can’t stay like that.” He said nothing, staring at the saliva rolling down the wall.6

  At the time, Maria Svanidze, the wife of Alyosha, his former brother-in-law, who now began to keep a remarkable diary,52 thought Nadya’s death had made him “less of a marble hero.”

  In his despair, he repeated two questions: “Never mind the children, they forgot her in a few days, but how could she do this to me?” Sometimes he saw it the other way round, asking Budyonny: “I understand how she could do this to me, but what about the children?” Always the conversation ended thus: “She broke my life. She crippled me.” This was a humiliating personal failure that undermined his confidence. Stalin, wrote Svetlana, “wanted to resign but the Politburo said, ‘No, no, you have to stay!’ ”

  He swiftly recovered the Messianic confidence in his mission: the war against the peasants and his enemies within the Party. His mind strayed onto the newly arrested Eismont, Smirnov and Riutin whose “Platform” had been found in his wife’s room. He was drinking a lot, suffering insomnia. A month after her death, on 17 December, he scrawled a strange note to Voroshilov: “The cases of Eismont, Smirnov and Riutin are full of alcohol. We see an opposition steeped in vodka. Eismont, Rykov. Hunting wild animals. Tomsky, repeat Tomsky. Roaring wild animals that growl. Smirnov and other Moscow rumours. Like a desert. I feel terrible, not sleeping much.” This letter shows how disturbed Stalin was after Nadya’s death. It reeks of drink and despair.

  He did not soften towards the peasants. On 28 December, Postyshev sent Stalin a note about placing GPU guards on grain elevators because so much bread was being stolen by starving people. Then he added, “There’ve been strong elements of sabotage of bread supplies in the collective Machine Tractor Stations . . . Let me send 2–300 kulaks from Dneipropetrovsk to the North by order of the GPU.”

  “Right! Pravilno!” agreed Stalin enthusiastically in his blue pencil.

  Nadya hung over Stalin until his own death. Whenever he encountered anyone who knew Nadya well, he talked about her. Two years later, when he met Bukharin at the theatre, he missed a whole act, talking about Nadya, how he could not live without her. He often discussed her with Budyonny.53 The family met every 8th of November to remember her but he hated these anniversaries, remaining in the south—yet he always kept photographs of her, larger and larger ones, round his houses. He claimed he gave up dancing when Nadya died.

  Thousands of letters of condolence poured into Stalin’s apparat so the few he chose to keep are interesting: “She was fragile as a flower,” read one. Perhaps he preserved it because it finished about him: “Remember, we need you so take care of yourself.” Then he kept a poem sent to him, dedicated to her, that again appealed to his vision of self:

  Night ocean, Wild storm . . .

  A haunted silhouette on the bridge of the ship.

  It’s the captain. Who is he?

  A man of blood and flesh.

  Or is he iron and steel?

  When students wanted to name their institute after her, he did not agree but simply sent the request to Nadya’s sister, Anna: “After reading this note, leave it on my desk!” The pain of the subject was still fresh sixteen years later when a sculptor wrote to say that he wanted to give Stalin a bust of Nadya. Stalin wrote laconically to Poskrebyshev, his chef de cabinet: “ Tell him that you received the letter and you’re returning it. Stalin.”

  There was no time for mourning. The Party was at war.

  At 4 p.m. on 12 November, the day after the funeral, Stalin arrived at his office to meet Kaganovich, Voroshilov, Molotov and Sergo. Alongside them was Stalin’s closest friend, Sergei Mironovich Kirov, First Secretary of Leningrad and Politburo member. “After Nadya’s tragic death,” Maria Svanidze noticed that “Kirov was the closest person who managed to approach Joseph intimately and simply, to give him that missing warmth and cosiness.” Stalin turned to Kirov who, he said, “cared for me like a child.”7

  Always singing operatic arias loudly, brimming with good cheer and boyish enthusiasm, Kirov was one of those uncomplicated men who win friends easily. Small, handsome with deep-set brown, slightly Tartar eyes, pock-marked, brown-haired and high-cheekboned, women and men seemed to like him equally. Married without children, he was said to be a womanizer with a special eye on the ballerinas of the Mariinsky Ballet which he controlled in Leningrad.54 Certainly he followed ballet and opera closely, listening to it in his own apartment by a special link. A workaholic like his comrades, Kirov liked the outdoors, camping and hunting, with his boon companion Sergo. Like Andreyev, Kirov was an avid mountaineer, an appropriate hobby for a Bolshevik. He was at ease in his own skin. It was perhaps this that made him so attractive to Stalin whose friendships resembled crushes—and, like crushes, they could turn swiftly into bitter envy. Now he wanted to be with Kirov all the time: Kirov was in and out of his office five times during the days after Nadya’s funeral.

  Born Sergei Kostrikov in 1886, the son of a feckless clerk who left him an orphan, in Urzhum, five hundred miles north-east of Moscow, Kirov was sent by charity to the Kazan Industrial School where he excelled. But the 1905 Revolution interfered with his plans for university, and he joined the Social Democrat Party, becoming a professional revolutionary. In between exiles, he married the daughter of a Jewish watchmaker but like all good Bolsheviks, his personal life “was subordinated to the revolutionary cause,” according to his wife. During the doldrums before the war, Kirov had worked as a journalist in the bourgeois press, which was strictly banned by the Party, and this was a black mark on his Bolshevik pedigree. Nineteen seventeen found him setting up power in the Terek in the North Caucasus. During the Civil War, Kirov was one of the swashbuckling commissars in the North Caucasus beside Sergo and Mikoyan. In Astrakhan he enforced Bolshevik power in March 1919 with liberal blood-letting: over four thousand were killed. When a bourgeois was caught hiding his own furniture, Kirov ordered him shot. He and Sergo, whose lives and deaths were parallel, engineered the seizure of Georgia in 1921, remaining in Baku afterwards, both brutal Bolsheviks of the Civil War generation.

  He had probably met Stalin in 1917 but got to know his patron on holiday in 1925: “Dear Koba, I’m in Kislovodsk . . . I’m getting better. In a week, I’ll come to you . . . Greetings to everyone. Say hello to Nadya,” he wrote. Kirov was a family favourite. Stalin inscribed a copy of his book On Lenin and Leninism: “To SM Kirov, my friend and beloved brother.” In 1926, Stalin removed Zinoviev from his Leningrad power base and promoted Kirov to take over Peter the Great’s capital, now the second largest Party in the State. He joined the Politburo in 1930.8

  When Kirov asked if he could fly south to join him for the 1931 holidays, Stalin replied: “I have no right and would not advise anyone to authorize flights. I most humbly request you to come by train.” Artyom, often on these holidays, recalls, “Stalin was so fond of Kirov, he’d personally meet Kirov’s train in Sochi.” Stalin always had “a lovely time with Kirov,” even swimming and visiting the banya. Sometimes when Kirov swam, “Stalin went to the beach and sat waiting for Kirov,” says Artyom.

  After Nadya’s death, Stalin’s friendship with “my Kirich” became more insistent. Stalin often called him in Leningrad at any time of the night: the vertushka phone can still be seen by Kirov’s bed in his apartment. When he came to Moscow, Kirov preferred to stay with Sergo, who was so fond of his boon companion that his widow remembered how he once faked a car crash to ensure that Kirov missed his train.55 Yet Stalin and Kirov were “like a pair o
f equal brothers, teasing one another, telling dirty stories, laughing,” says Artyom. “Big friends, brothers and they needed one another.”9

  This did not mean that Stalin completely trusted Kirov. In the autumn of 1929, Stalin orchestrated Pravda’s criticism of Kirov.10 However fond he was of Kirov, Stalin could also be cross with him. In June 1928, one of his articles seemed to have been edited when it appeared in Leningradskaya Pravda, provoking a letter that revealed Stalin’s thin-skinned paranoia on even small matters: “I understand . . . the technical reasons . . . Yet I’ve heard no other such examples of articles by Politburo members . . . It seems strange that the 40–50 words cut are the brightest about how the peasantry are a capitalist class . . . I await your explanation.” 11

  Kirov did not regard Stalin as a saint: during the 1929 birthday celebrations that raised Stalin to Vozhd, the Leningraders dared to mention Lenin’s views on Stalin’s rudeness.12 Kirov knew Stalin’s unusual mentality well: when a student sent him some questions on ideology, he forwarded them to Kirov with this note: “Kirov! You must read the letter of student Fedotov . . . an absolutely politically illiterate young man. Maybe you will telephone him and talk to him, probably he is a corrupted drunken “Party member.” We must not introduce the GPU I think. By the way, the student is a very good trickster with an anti-Soviet face which he conceals artistically beneath a simple face that says ‘Help me understand. Maybe you understand all—I don’t.’ Greetings! Stalin.” 13 No doubt Kirov’s intimacy with Sergo, Kuibyshev and Mikoyan worried Stalin. The challenges of 1932—the Riutin Platform, Kirov’s possible resistance to Riutin’s execution, the famine, the suicide of Nadezhda—had shown Stalin needed firmer loyalty.

  After Nadya’s death, Kirov was almost part of the family: Stalin insisted he stay with him, not Sergo. Kirov stayed at Stalin’s apartment so often he knew where the sheets and pillows were and he would bed down on the sofa. The children loved Kirov and sometimes when he was there, Svetlana would put on a doll show for him. Her favourite game was her own mock government. Her father was “First Secretary.” This Stalinette wrote orders like: “To my First Secretary, I order you to allow me to go with you to the theatre.” She signed it “The Mistress [or Boss— khozyaika] Setanka.” She hung the notes in the dining room above the telephone table. Stalin replied: “I obey.” Kaganovich, Molotov and Sergo were Setanka’s Second Secretaries, but “she has a special friendship with Kirov,” noticed Maria Svanidze, “because Joseph is so good and close with him.”14

  Stalin returned to the ascetic Bedouin life of the underground Bolshevik, with the tension and variety of the revolutionary on the run, except that now his restless progress more resembled the train of a Mongol Khan. Though a creature of routine, he needed perpetual movement: there were beds in his houses but there were also big, hard divans in every room. “I never sleep on a bed,” he told a visitor. “Always a divan,” and on whichever one he happened to be reading. “Which historical person had the same Spartan habit?” he asked, answering with that autodidactic omniscience: “Nicholas I.” Nadya’s death naturally changed the way Stalin and his children lived.15

  9

  The Omnipotent Widower and His Loving Family: Sergo the Bolshevik Prince

  Stalin could not bear to go on living in the Poteshny Palace apartment and the Zubalovo mansion because Nadya’s homes were too painful for him. Bukharin offered to swap apartments. Stalin accepted this comradely offer and moved into Bukharin’s apartment on the first floor of the triangular Yellow Palace, the old Senate,56 roughly beneath his office. Since his office stood where the two wings of the Senate met at an angle, it was known to the cognoscenti as the “Little Corner.” Its polished floors, with their red and green carpets running down the centre, its wooden panelling up to shoulder height, its dreary drapes, were kept as clean and silent as a hospital. His secretary, Poskrebyshev, sat at the front of the anteroom, his desk immaculate, controlling access. Stalin’s office itself was long, airy and rectangular, heavy with drapes, and lined with ornate Russian stoves against which he would lean to ease the aching in his limbs. A huge desk stood at the far right corner while a long green baize table, with straightbacked chairs in white covers, stood to the left beneath portraits of Marx and Lenin.1

  Downstairs, his “formal,” gloomy apartment with the “vaulted ceilings” was to be his Moscow residence until his death. “It was not like a home,” wrote Svetlana. It had once been a corridor. He expected the children to be there every evening when he returned for supper to review and sign their homework, like every parent. Until the war, he maintained this dutiful routine—some of his parental reports to the children’s teachers survive in the archive.

  The children adored Zubalovo—it was their real home so Stalin decided not to uproot them but to build his own “wonderful, airy modern one-storey” dacha at Kuntsevo, nine kilometres from the Kremlin. This now became his main residence, until he died there twenty years later, developing over the years into a large but austere two-storey mansion, painted a grim camouflage green, with a complex of guardhouses, guest villas, greenhouses, a Russian bath and a special cottage for his library, all surrounded by pinewoods, two concentric fences, innumerable checkpoints and at least a hundred guards.57 Here he indulged his natural craving for privacy, the external expression of his emotional detachment: no guards or servants stayed in the house; unless friends came for the night, he henceforth closed himself in, quite alone. Stalin drove out to Kuntsevo after dinner—it was so close it was often called “Nearby” by his circle because he also sometimes stayed at his other home, “Faraway,” at Semyonovskoe. The idyllic life went on at Zubalovo, Svetlana’s “paradise like an enchanted island.”

  Stalin did not become a haunted hermit after Nadya’s death. It was true he spent ever more time with his male magnates, almost like the segregated court of a seventeenth-century Tsar. But the all-powerful widower also found himself in the loving but overwhelming embrace of a newly reconstructed family. Pavel and Zhenya Alliluyev, recently returned from Berlin, became his constant companions. Nadya’s sister Anna and her husband Stanislas Redens had returned from Kharkov for his new appointment as Moscow GPU boss. Redens, a handsome burly Pole with a quiff, always sporting his Chekist uniform, had been the secretary of the founder of the secret police, Dzerzhinsky. He and Anna fell in love during Stalin and Dzerzhinsky’s expedition to investigate the fall of Perm in 1919. Redens had a reputation among austere Old Bolsheviks of “putting on airs” and being a drinker because of an unfortunate incident. Until 1931, he had been Georgian GPU boss. However, his deputy, Beria, had, according to the family, outwitted Redens in a prank more worthy of a hearty stag night than a secret police intrigue—but it worked nonetheless. Beria got Redens drunk and sent him home naked. Family legends rarely tell the whole story: Stalin’s letters reveal that Redens and local bosses tried to have Beria removed to the Lower Volga but someone, probably Stalin, intervened. Beria never forgave him. But it was Redens, not Beria, who left Tiflis.

  Stalin liked his cheerful brother-in-law but doubted his competence as a Chekist, removing him from the Ukraine. Anna, a loving mother to their two sons, was a good-natured but imprudent woman who, her own children admit, talked too much. Stalin called her “a chatterbox.”2

  A third couple made up this sextet of loving relatives. Alexander “Alyosha” Svanidze, also just back from abroad, was the brother of Stalin’s first wife, Kato, who died in 1907. “Handsome, blond, with blue eyes and an aquiline nose,” he was a Georgian dandy, speaking French and German, who had helped rule Georgia in the 1920s and now held high rank in the State Bank. Stalin loved him—“they were like brothers,” wrote Mikoyan. His wife, Maria, was a Jewish Georgian soprano “with a tiny upturned nose, peaches and cream complexion and big blue eyes,” who was the prima donna in the full-time opera of her own life.58 Svetlana said this glossy couple were brash, always bearing presents from abroad. That avid diarist, Maria, like all the ladies of Stalin’s court, seemed somewhat in lo
ve with their Vozhd. There was constant, bitchy competition for his favour among these ladies who were so busy feeling superior to, and undermining, the others that they often missed dangerous signs of Stalin’s seething moods.3

  Meanwhile, Yakov, now twenty-seven, was qualifying as an electrical engineer though Stalin had wanted him to be a soldier. Yasha “resembled his father in voice and looks” but irritated him. Sometimes Stalin managed to show brisk affection: he sent him one of his books, The Conquest of Nature, inscribing it: “Yasha read this book at once. J. Stalin.” 4

  As Svetlana grew up into a freckly redhead, Stalin said she precisely resembled his mother, always the highest praise from him—but really, she was like him: intelligent, stubborn and determined. “I was his pet,” says Svetlana. “After mother’s death, he tried to be closer. He was very affectionate—he just wanted to see how I was doing. I do appreciate now that he was a very loving father . . .” Maria Svanidze recorded how Svetlana buzzed around her father: “He kissed her, admired her, fed her from his plate, selecting the best slices for her.” Svetlana, at seven, often declared: “Providing daddy loves me, I don’t care if the whole world hates me! If daddy told me, ‘fly to the moon,’ I’d do it!” Yet she found his affection stifling—“always that tobacco smell, puffing clouds of smoke with moustache and he was hugging and kissing me.” Svetlana was really raised by her beloved nanny, the sturdy Alexandra Bychkova, and the stalwart housekeeper, Carolina Til.5