Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  Nadya’s godfather crossed the line between family and politics in Stalin’s life and this proved a dangerous fence to straddle. A generous friend to Left and Right, he may have objected to the 1st December Law but he also personified the decadence of the new nobility. Abel was not the only one: Stalin felt himself surrounded by pigs at the trough. Stalin was always alone even among his convivial entourage, convinced of his separateness and often lonely. As recently as 1933, he had begged Yenukidze to holiday with him. In Moscow, Stalin often asked Mikoyan and Alyosha Svanidze, who was like “a brother” to him, to stay overnight. Mikoyan stayed a few times but his wife was unhappy about it: “How could she check whether I was really at Stalin’s?” Svanidze stayed more often.17

  The catalyst for Yenukidze’s fall was Stalin’s favourite subject: personal history for the Bolsheviks was what genealogy was for the medieval knights. When his book The Secret Bolshevik Printing Presses was published, it was eagerly sent to Stalin by his weasel-faced Pravda editor, Mekhlis, with a note that “some parts are . . . marked.” Stalin’s marginalia in his copy show his almost Blimpish irritation: “That’s false!”, “fibs” and “balderdash!” When Yenukidze wrote an article about his activities in Baku, Stalin distributed it to the Politburo peppered with “Ha-ha-ha!” Yenukidze made a grievous mistake in not lying about Stalin’s heroic exploits. This was understandable because the outstanding part in the creation of the Baku movement had been played by himself.

  “What more does he want?” Yenukidze complained. “I am doing everything he has asked me to do but it is not enough for him. He wants me to admit he is a genius.”18

  Others were not so proud. In 1934, Lakoba published a sycophantic history of Stalin’s heroic role in Batumi. Not to be outdone, Beria mobilized an array of historians to falsify his On the History of the Bolshevik Organizations in the Transcaucasus which was published later in the year under his own name.

  “To my dear, adored master,” Beria inscribed his book, “to the Great Stalin!”19

  Now Nadya’s death caught up with Yenukidze: a terrorist cell was “uncovered” by Yezhov in the Kremlin, which Abel ran. Kaganovich raged, Shakespearean style, “There was something rotten there.” The NKVD arrested 110 of Yenukidze’s employees, librarians and maids, for terrorism. Stalinist plots always featured a wicked beauty: sure enough, there was a “Countess,” said to have poisoned book pages to kill Stalin. Two were sentenced to death and the rest from five to ten years in the camps. Like everything that happened around Stalin, this “Kremlin Case” had various angles: it was partly aimed at Yenukidze, partly at clearing the Kremlin of possibly disloyal elements, but it was also somehow connected to Nadya. A maid, whose appeal to President Kalinin is in the archives, was arrested for gossiping with her friends about Nadya’s suicide. Stalin had surely not forgotten that Yenukidze had “swayed” Nadya politically, and been the first to see the body.

  Yenukidze was sacked, made to publish a “Correction of Errors,” demoted to run a Caucasian sanatorium and viciously attacked by Yezhov (and Beria) at a Plenum. Blackberry first raised the stakes: Zinoviev and Kamenev were not just morally responsible for Kirov’s murder—they planned it. Then he turned to poor “Uncle Abel” whom he accused of political blindness and criminal complacency in letting the “counter-revolutionary Zinoviev-Kamenev and Trotskyite terrorists” feather their nests inside the Kremlin while plotting to kill Stalin. “This nearly cost Comrade Stalin his life,” he alleged. Yenukidze was “the most typical representative of the corrupt and self-complacent Communists, playing the ‘liberal’ gentleman at the expense of the Party and State.” Yenukidze defended himself by blaming Yagoda: “No one was hired for work without security clearance!”

  “Not true!” retorted Yagoda.

  “Yes it is! . . . I—more than anyone else—can find a host of blunders. These may be indignantly characterized—as treason and duplicity.”

  “Just the same,” intervened Beria, attacking Yenukidze for his generous habit of helping fallen comrades, “why did you give out loans and assistance?”

  “Just a minute . . .” answered Yenukidze, citing an old friend who had been in the opposition, “I knew his present and past better than Beria.”

  “We knew his present situation as well as you do.”

  “I didn’t help him personally.”

  “He’s an active Trotskyite,” retorted Beria.

  “Deported by the Soviet authorities,” intervened Stalin himself.

  “You acted wrongly,” Mikoyan added.

  Yenukidze admitted giving another oppositionist some money because his wife appealed to him.

  “So what if she starves to death,” said Sergo, “so what if she croaks, what does it have to do with you?”

  “What are you? Some kind of child?” Voroshilov called out. The attacks on Yenukidze’s lax security were also attacks on Yagoda: “I admit my guilt,” he confessed, “in that I did not . . . seize Yenukidze by the throat . . .”

  On the question of how to punish Yenukidze, there was disagreement: “I must admit,” Kaganovich said, “that not everyone found his bearings in this matter . . . but Comrade Stalin at once smelled a rat . . .” The rat was finally expelled from the Central Committee and the Party (temporarily).20

  Days afterwards, at Kuntsevo, a grumpy Stalin suddenly smiled at Maria Svanidze: “Are you pleased Abel’s been punished?” Maria was delighted at his overdue cleansing of the suppurating wound of depravity. On May Day, Zhenya and the Svanidzes joined Stalin and Kaganovich for kebabs, onions and sauce but the Vozhd was tense until the women started bickering. Then they toasted Nadya: “She crippled me,” reflected Stalin. “After condemning Yasha for shooting himself, how could Nadya kill herself ?”2184

  15

  The Tsar Rides the Metro

  A mid the Yenukidze Case, Stalin, Kaganovich and Sergo attended the birthday party of Svetlana’s beloved nanny at his apartment. “Joseph has bought a hat and wool stockings” for the nanny. He cheerfully and lovingly fed Svetlana from his own plate. Everyone was filled with excitement and optimism because the great Moscow underground, named the Kaganovich Metro, a magnificent Soviet showpiece with marble halls like palaces, had just opened. Its creator Kaganovich had brought ten tickets for Svetlana, her aunts and the bodyguards to ride the Metro. Suddenly Stalin, encouraged by Zhenya and Maria, decided he would go too.

  This change of plan provoked a “commotion” among Stalin’s courtiers which is hilariously described in Maria’s diary. They became so nervous at this unplanned excursion that even the Premier was telephoned; almost half the ruling Politburo was involved within minutes. All were already sitting in their limousines when Molotov scurried across the courtyard to inform Stalin that “such a trip might be dangerous without preparation.” Kaganovich, “the most worried of all, went pale” and suggested they go at midnight when the Metro was closed but Stalin insisted. Three limousines of magnates, ladies, children and guards sped out of the Kremlin to the station, dismounted and descended into Kaganovich’s tunnels. Once they arrived on the platform, there was no train. One can only imagine Kaganovich’s frantic efforts to find one fast. The public noticed Stalin and shouted compliments. Stalin became impatient. When a train finally arrived, the party climbed aboard to cheers.

  They got out at Okhotny Ryad to inspect the station. Stalin was mobbed by his fans and Maria almost crushed against a pillar but the NKVD finally caught up with them. Vasily was frightened, Maria noticed, but Stalin was jovial. There was then a thoroughly Russian mix-up as Stalin decided to go home, changed his mind and got out at the Arbat where there was another near-riot before they all got back to the Kremlin. Vasily was so upset by the whole experience that he cried on his bed and had to be given valerian drops.1

  The trip marked another decline in relations between the leaders and the Svanidze and Alliluyev ladies, those un-Bolshevik actresses, all “powder and lipstick” in Maria’s words. Kaganovich was furious with the women for persuading Stalin
to travel on the Metro without any warning: he hissed at them that he would have arranged the trip if only they had given him some notice. Only Sergo would have shaken his head at this ludicrous scene. Dora Khazan, working her way up the Light Industry Commissariat, thought they were “trivial women who did nothing, frivolous time wasters.” The family began to feel that “we were just poor relations,” said Kira Alliluyeva. “That’s how they made us feel. Even Poskrebyshev looked down on us as if we were in the way.” As for Beria, the family, with fatal misjudgement, made no bones of their dislike of him. The women interfered and gossiped in a way that Nadya never had. But in the stern Bolshevik world, and especially given Stalin’s views of family, they went too far. Maria, who had sneaked to Stalin about Yenukidze’s amours, boasted to her diary, “They even say I’m stronger than the Politburo because I can overturn its decrees.”

  Worse, the women pursued vendettas against each other: The photograph of the 1934 birthday party now caused another row that undermined Stalin’s trust. When Sashiko Svanidze stayed with him at Kuntsevo, she found the photograph on Stalin’s desk and borrowed it in order to print up some copies, the sort of pushy behaviour often found in ambitious women at imperial courts, suggesting that these ladies regularly read the papers on Stalin’s desk. Maria, who loathed Sashiko’s brazen climbing, discovered this, warning Stalin: “You can’t let her make a shop out of your house and start trading on your kind-heartedness.” It was a rare occasion indeed when Stalin was criticized for his big-heartedness.

  He became irritated, blaming his secretaries and Vlasik for losing the photographs. Eventually he said Sashiko could “go to Hell” but his fury applied equally to all the family: “I know she did wonderful things for me and other Old Bolsheviks . . . but nonetheless, she always takes offence, writes letters to me at the drop of a hat, and demands my attention. I have no time to look after myself and I couldn’t even look after my own wife . . .” Nadya was constantly on his mind at this time.

  Sashiko was dropped, to Zhenya and Maria’s delight, yet they themselves took liberties. The Svanidzes still acted as if Joseph was their kind-hearted paterfamilias, not the Great Stalin. When Stalin invited the Svanidzes and Alliluyevs to join him for dinner after watching the Kirov Ballet, “we badly miscalculated the time and did not arrive until almost midnight when the ballet ended at ten. Joseph does not like to wait.” This understates the case: it is hard to imagine anyone forgetting the time and leaving an American president waiting for two hours. Here we see Stalin through the eyes of his friends before the Terror turned him into a latter-day Ivan the Terrible: we find him “stood up” by his dinner dates for two hours, left at Kuntsevo to play billiards with the bodyguards! Stalin, his sense of historic and sacerdotal mission despoiled, must have reflected on the disrespect of these Soviet aristocrats: they were not remotely afraid of him.

  When they arrived, the men went off to play billiards with the disgruntled Stalin who was distinctly unfriendly to the women. But after the wine, he shone with pride about Svetlana, recounting her charming sayings like any father. Nonetheless they would pay for their tardiness.2

  Stalin had loved his unscheduled Metro ride, telling Maria how moved he was “by the love of the people for their leader. Here nothing was prepared and fixed. As he said...the people need a Tsar, whom they can worship and for whom they can live and work.”3 He had always believed the “Russian people are Tsarist.” At various times, he compared himself to Peter the Great, Alexander I and Nicholas I but this child of Georgia, a Persian satrapy for centuries, also identified with the Shahs. He named two monarchs as his “teachers” in his own notes: one was Nadir Shah, the eighteenth-century Persian empire builder of whom he wrote: “Nadir Khan. Teacher.” (He was also interested in another Shah, Abbas, who beheaded a father’s two sons and sent him their heads: “Am I like the Shah?” he asked Beria.)

  But he regarded Ivan the Terrible as his true alter ego, his “teacher,” 85 something he revealed constantly to comrades such as Molotov, Zhdanov and Mikoyan, applauding the Tsar’s necessary murder of over-mighty boyars. Ivan too had lost his beloved wife, murdered by his boyars. This raises the question of how his grandees could have claimed to be “tricked” by Stalin’s real nature when he openly lauded a Tsar who systematically murdered his nobility.4

  Now, in late 1935, he also began to reproduce some of the trappings of Tsardom: in September, he restored the title Marshal of the Soviet Union (though not Field Marshal), promoting Voroshilov, Budyonny and three other heroes of the Civil War: Tukhachevsky whom he hated; Alexander Yegorov, the new Chief of Staff, whose wife had so upset Nadya on the night of her suicide; and the legendary Vasily Blyukher. For the NKVD, he created a rank equivalent to Marshal, promoting Yagoda to Commissar-General of State Security. Sartorial splendour suddenly mattered again: Voroshilov and Yagoda gloried in their uniforms. When Stalin sent Bukharin on a trip to Paris, he told him, “Your suit is threadbare. You can’t travel like that . . . Things are different with us now; you have to be well dressed.” Such was Stalin’s eye for detail that the tailor from the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs called that afternoon.

  More than that, the NKVD had access to the latest luxuries, money and houses. “Permit me 60,000 gold roubles to buy cars for our NKVD workers,” wrote Yagoda in a pink pen to Molotov on 15 June 1935. Interestingly Stalin (in blue) and Molotov (in red) signed it but reduced it to 40,000. But that was still a lot of Cadillacs. Stalin had already ordered that the Rolls-Royces in the Kremlin be concentrated in the “special garage.” 5

  Stalin had become a Tsar: children now chanted, “Thank you, Comrade Stalin, for our happy childhood,” perhaps because he now restored Christmas trees. But unlike the bejewelled Romanovs, identified so closely with the old Russian village and peasantry, Stalin created his own special kind of Tsar, modest, austere, mysterious and urban. There was no contradiction with his Marxism.6

  Sometimes Stalin’s loving care for his people was slightly absurd. In November 1935, for example, Mikoyan announced to the Stakhanovites in the Kremlin that Stalin was taking great interest in soap. He had demanded samples, “after which we received a special Central Committee decree on the assortment and composition of soap,” he declared to cheers. Then Stalin moved from soap to lavatories. Khrushchev ran Moscow with Mayor Nikolai Bulganin, another rising star, a handsome but ruthless blond ex-Chekist with a goatee beard: Stalin nicknamed them the “city fathers.” Now he summoned Khrushchev: “Talk it over with Bulganin and do something . . . People hunt around desperately and can’t find anywhere to relieve themselves . . .”7 But he liked to play the Little Father intervening from on high for his people. In April, a teacher in Kazakhstan named Karenkov appealed to Stalin about losing his job.

  “I order you to stop the persecution of teacher Karenkov at once,” he ordered86 the Kazakh bosses.8 It is hard to imagine either Hitler or even President Roosevelt investigating urinals, soap or that smalltown teacher.

  The dim but congenial Voroshilov initiated another step deeper into the mire of Soviet depravity when he read an article about teenage hooliganism. He wrote a note to the Politburo saying that Khrushchev, Bulganin and Yagoda “agree there is no alternative but to imprison the little vagabonds . . . I don’t understand why one doesn’t shoot the scum.” Stalin and Molotov jumped at the chance to add another terrible weapon to their arsenal for use against political opponents, decreeing that children of twelve could now be executed. 9

  On holiday in Sochi, Stalin was still infuriated by the antics of fallen friends and truculent children. The relentlessly convivial Yenukidze was still chattering about politics to his old pal, Sergo. Once a man had fallen, Stalin could not understand how any loyalist could remain friends with him. Stalin confided his distrust of Sergo to Kaganovich (Sergo’s friend): “Strange that Sergo . . . continues to be friends with” Yenukidze. Stalin ordered that Abel, this “weird fellow,” be moved away from his resort. He fulminated against “the Yenukidze group” as “scum.” The Old
Bolsheviks were “ ‘old farts’ in Lenin’s phrase.” Kaganovich moved Abel to Kharkov.10

  Vasily, now fourteen, worried him too: the greater Stalin’s absolutism, the worse Vasily’s delinquency. This mini-Stalin aped his Chekist handlers, denouncing his teachers’ wives: “Father, I’ve already asked the Commandant to remove the teacher’s wife but he refused . . .” he wrote. The harassed Commandant of Zubalovo reported that while “Svetlana studies well, Vasya does badly—he is lazy.” The schoolmasters called Carolina Til to ask what to do. Vasily played truant or claimed “Comrade Stalin” had ordered him not to work with certain teachers. When the housekeeper found money in his pocket, Vasily would not reveal where he had come by it. On 9 September 1935, Efimov reported chillingly to Stalin that Vasily had written: “Vasya Stalin, born in March 1921, died in 1935.” Suicide was a fact in that family but also in the Bolshevik culture. As Stalin cleansed the Party, his opponents began to commit suicide, which only served to outrage him more: he called it “spitting in the eye of the Party.”

  Soon afterwards, Vasily entered an artillery school, along with other leaders’ children including Stepan Mikoyan; his teacher also wrote to Stalin to complain of Vasily’s suicide threats: “I’ve received your letter about Vasily’s tricks,” wrote Stalin to V. V. Martyshin. “I’m answering very late because I’m so busy. Vasily is a spoilt boy of average abilities, savage (a type of Scythian), not always honest, uses blackmail against weak ‘rules,’ is often impudent with the weak . . . He’s spoilt by different patrons who remind him at every step that he’s ‘Stalin’s son.’ I’m happy to see you’re a good teacher who treats Vasily like other children and demands he obey the school regime . . . If Vasily has not ruined himself until now, it’s because in our country there are teachers who give no quarter to this capricious son of a baron. My advice is: treat Vasily MORE STRICTLY and don’t be afraid of this child’s false blackmailing threats of ‘suicide.’ I’ll support you...”11