Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  Yevgenia waited at the dacha with her daughter Natasha and her friend Zinaida. She was desperately worried about the family—and who can blame her? Her nerves cracked. In hospital, they diagnosed an “asthenic-depressive condition perhaps cyclothymia,” sending her to a sanatorium near Moscow.

  When Zinaida was arrested, Yevgenia wrote to Stalin: “I beg you Comrade Stalin to read this letter . . . I am treated by professors but what sense does it make if I am burned by the thought that you distrust me? . . . You are dear and beloved to me.” Swearing on her daughter’s life that she was honest, she admitted that “in my personal life, there have been mistakes about which I could tell you, and all of it because of jealousy.” Stalin doubtless already knew all her Messalinian exploits. She made the sacrificial offer: “Let them take away my freedom, my life . . . but I will not give up the right to love you as everybody does who loves the country and the Party.” She signed off: “I feel like a living corpse. What am I to do? Forgive my letter written in bed.” Stalin did not reply.

  The trap was swinging shut on Yevgenia and her Kolyushenka. On 8 October, Kaganovich drafted a Politburo resolution on the NKVD. On 17 November, a Politburo commission denounced “very serious faults in the work of the Organs of NKVD.” The deadly troikas were dissolved. Stalin and Molotov signed a report, disassociating themselves from the Terror. 5

  At the 7 November parade, Yezhov appeared on the Mausoleum but lingered behind Stalin. Then he disappeared and was replaced by Beria in the blue cap and uniform of a Commissar First Class of State Security. When Stalin ordered the arrest of Yezhov’s friend, Uspensky, Ukrainian NKVD chief, the dwarf forewarned him. Uspensky faked suicide and went on the run. Stalin (probably rightly) suspected that Yezhov was bugging his phones.

  In her own way, Yevgenia loved Yezhov, despite all their infidelities, and adored their daughter Natasha, because she was willing to sacrifice herself to save them. Her friend Zinaida Ordzhonikidze, Sergo’s widow, visited her in hospital, a heroic act of loyalty. Yevgenia gave her a letter for Yezhov in which she offered to commit suicide and asked for a sleeping draught. She suggested that he send a little statuette of a gnome when the time came. He sent Luminal, then, a little later, he ordered the maid to take his wife the statuette. Given Yezhov’s dwarfish stature, this deadly gnome seems farcical: perhaps the statuette was an old keepsake representing “darling Kolya” himself from the early days of their romance. When Glikina’s arrest made her own inevitable, Yevgenia sent a note bidding Yezhov goodbye. On 19 November, she took the Luminal.

  At 11 p.m., as Yevgenia sank into unconsciousness, Yezhov arrived at the Little Corner, where he found the Politburo with Beria and Malenkov, who attacked him for five hours. Yevgenia died two days later. Yezhov himself reflected that he had been “compelled to sacrifice her to save himself.” She had married a monster but died young to save their daughter which, in its way, was a maternal end to a life devoted to innocent fun. Babel heard that “Stalin can’t understand her death. His own nerves are made of steel so he just can’t understand how, in other people, they give out.” The Yezhovs’ adopted daughter137 Natasha, nine, was taken in by his ex-wife’s sister and then sent to one of those grim orphanages for the children of Enemies.6

  Two days after Yevgenia’s death, on 23 November, Yezhov returned for another four hours of criticism from Stalin, Molotov and Voroshilov, after which he resigned from the NKVD. But he remained in limbo as CC Secretary, Commissar of Water Transport, and a candidate Politburo member, living in the Kremlin like a tiny ghost for a little longer, experiencing what his victims had known before him. His friends “turned their back upon me as if I was plague-ridden . . . I never realized the depth of meanness of all these people.” He blamed the Terror on the Vozhd, using a Russian idiom: “God’s will—the Tsar’s trial” with himself as the Tsar and Stalin as God.

  Yezhov consoled himself with a series of drunken bisexual orgies in his Kremlin apartment. Inviting two drinking buddies and homosexual lovers from his youth to stay, he enjoyed “the most perverted forms of debauchery.” His nephews brought him girls but he also returned to homosexuality. When one crony, Konstantinov, brought his wife to the party, Yezhov danced the foxtrot with her, pulled out his member, and then slept with her. On the next night, when the long-suffering Konstantinov arrived, they drank and danced to the gramophone until the guest fell asleep only to be awoken: “I felt something in my mouth. When I opened my eyes, I saw that Yezhov had shoved his member into my mouth.” Unzipped and undone, Yezhov awaited his fate.7

  Beria, whom Stalin nicknamed “The Prosecutor,” was triumphantly appointed Commissar on 25 November,138 and summoned his Georgian henchmen to Moscow. Having destroyed the entourages of the Old Bolshevik “princes,” Stalin now had to import Beria’s whole gang to destroy Yezhov’s.

  Ironically, Beria’s courtiers were much more educated than Kaganovich or Voroshilov but education is no bar to barbarism. The grey-haired, charming and refined Merkulov, a Russified Armenian, who was to write plays under the pseudonym Vsevolod Rok that were performed on Moscow stages, had known Beria since they studied together at the Baku Polytechnic and had joined the Cheka in 1920. Beria, who, like Stalin, coined nicknames for everyone, called him “the Theoretician.” Then there was the renegade Georgian prince (though aristocrats are as plentiful in Georgia as vines) Shalva Tsereteli, once a Tsarist officer and member of the anti-Bolshevik Georgian Legion, who had the air of an old-fashioned gentleman but was Beria’s private assassin, among his other duties in the NKVD’s Special Department. Then there was the bejewelled 300-pound giant—“the worst man God put on the face of the Earth”—Bogdan Kobulov. “A burly oversized Caucasian with muddy brown bullish eyes,” the “fat face of a man [who] likes good living . . . hairy hands, short bow legs,” and a dapper moustache, he was one of those hearty torturers who would have been as at home in the Gestapo as in the NKVD. He was so squat that Beria called him “the Samovar.”

  When Kobulov beat his victims, he used his fists, his elephantine weight and his favourite blackjack clubs. He arranged wiretaps of the magnates for Stalin but he also became a court jester, replacing the late Pauker, with his funny accents. He soon proved his usefulness: Beria was interrogating a victim in his office when the prisoner attacked him. Kobulov boasted about what happened next: “I saw the boss [he used the Georgian slang— khozeni] on the floor and I jumped on the fellow and crushed his neck with my own bare hands.” Yet even this brute sensed that his work was not right for he used to visit his mother and sob to her like an overgrown Georgian child: “Mama, mama, what are we doing? One day, I’ll pay for this.”

  The arrival of these exotic, strutting Georgians, some even convicted murderers, must have been like Pancho Villa and his banditos riding into a northern town in one of Beria’s favourite movies. Stalin later made a great play of sending some of them home, replacing them with Russians, but he remained very much a Georgian himself. Beria’s men gave Stalin’s entourage a distinctly Caucasian flavour. On the official date of Beria’s appointment, Stalin and Molotov signed off on the shooting of 3,176 people so they were busy.

  Beria appeared nightly in Lefortovo prison to torture Marshal Blyukher, assisted by “The Theoretician” Merkulov, “The Samovar” Kobulov, and his top interrogator, Rodos, who worked on the Marshal with such relish that he called out: “Stalin, can you hear what they’re doing to me?” They tortured him so hard that they managed to knock out one of his eyes and he later died of his wounds. Beria drove over to tell Stalin who ordered the body’s incineration. Meanwhile, Beria settled scores, personally arresting Alexander Kosarev, the Komsomol chief, who had once insulted him. Stalin later learned this was a personal vendetta: “They told me Beria was very vindictive but there was no evidence of it,” he reflected years later. “In Kosarev’s case, Zhdanov and Andreyev checked the evidence.”

  Beria revelled in the sport of power: Bukharin’s lovely widow, Anna Larina, still only twenty-four, was shown into his Lubianka o
ffice by Kobulov who then brought in sandwiches like an infernal Jeeves.

  “I should tell you that you look more beautiful than when I last saw you,” Beria told her. “Execution is for one time only. And Yezhov would certainly have executed you.” When she would not betray anyone, Beria and Kobulov stopped flirting. “Whom are you trying to save? After all, Nikolai Ivanovich [Bukharin] is no longer with us . . . You want to live? . . . If you don’t shut up, here’s what you’ll get!” He put a finger to his temple. “So will you promise me to shut up?” She saw that Beria wanted to save her and she promised.8 But she would not eat Kobulov’s sandwiches.139

  Stalin was careful not to place himself completely in the hands of Beria: the chief of State Security (First Branch), his personal security, was a sensitive but dangerous position. Two had been shot since Pauker but now Stalin appointed his personal bodyguard, Vlasik, to the job, in charge of the Leader’s security as well as the dachas, food for the kitchens, the car pool and millions of roubles. Henceforth, explains Artyom, Stalin “ruled through Poskrebyshev in political matters and Vlasik in personal ones.” Both were indefatigably industrious—and sleazy.

  The two men lived similar lives: their daughters recall how they spent only Sunday at home. Otherwise they were always with Stalin, returning exhausted to sleep. No one knew Stalin better. At home they never discussed politics but chatted about their fishing expeditions. Vlasik, who lived in the elegant villa on Gogolevsky Boulevard, was doggedly loyal, uneducated and drunkenly dissolute: he was already an insatiable womanizer who held parties with Poskrebyshev. He had so many “concubines,” he kept lists of them, forgot their names, and sometimes managed to have a different one in each room at his orgies. He called Stalin Khozyain , but “Comrade Stalin” to his face, rarely joining him at table.

  Poskrebyshev’s social status was higher, often joining the magnates at dinner and calling Stalin “Joseph Vissarionovich.” He was the butt and perpetrator of jokes. He sat doggedly at his desk outside Stalin’s office: the Little Corner was his domain. The magnates cultivated him, playing to his dog’s vanity so that he would warn them if Stalin was in a bad mood. Poskrebyshev always called Vyshinsky to say that Stalin was on his way to Kuntsevo so the Procurator could go to bed, and he once protected Khrushchev. He was so powerful that he could even insult the Politburo. The “faithful shield-bearer,” in Khrushchev’s words, played his role in Stalin’s most mundane deeds and the most terrible, boasting later about their use of poison. He was a loving husband to Bronka, and an indulgent father to the two children, Galya by her first husband and his own Natalya. But when the vertushka rang on Sundays, no one else was allowed to answer it. He was proud of his position: when his daughter had an operation, he lectured her that she had to behave in a way that befitted their station. Poskrebyshev worked closely with Beria: they often visited each other’s families but if there was business to conduct, they walked in the garden. But ultimately both Vlasik and Poskrebyshev were obstacles to Beria’s power.9 The same could no longer be said of the Alliluyev family.

  27

  Death of the Stalin Family: A Strange Proposal and the Housekeeper

  Letting Beria into the family was like locking a fox in a chicken coop but Stalin shares responsibility for their fates. “All our family,” wrote Svetlana, “was completely baffled as to why Stalin made Beria—a provincial secret policeman—so close to himself and the government in Moscow.” This was precisely why Stalin had promoted him: no one was sacred to Beria.

  The magnates and retainers all grumbled constantly about the self-importance of the “aunties.” Impertinent with the greatness of his new power and burning with the inferiority complex of a scorned provincial, Beria was determined to prove himself by destroying these glamorous but snobbish members of the new nobility. In the early thirties, Beria had tried to flirt with Zhenya while her husband and Stalin were sitting nearby.

  Zhenya strode up to Stalin: “If this bastard doesn’t leave me alone, I’ll smash his pince-nez.” Everyone laughed. Beria was embarrassed. But when Beria began to appear more regularly at Kuntsevo, he still flirted with Zhenya who appealed to Stalin: “Joseph! He’s trying to squeeze my knee!” Stalin probably regarded Beria as something of a card. The family were typical of the élite he was trying to destroy. When Beria turned up in a turtleneck pullover for dinner, Zhenya, who was always dressed to the nines without a hint of Bolshevik modesty, said loudly, “How dare you come to dinner like this?” Grandfather Alliluyev regularly described Beria as an “Enemy.”1

  In November 1938, Stalin’s family life really ended. Beria expanded the Terror to include anyone connected to Yezhov, who had not only appointed Stalin’s brother-in-law, Stanislas Redens, to run the NKVD in Kazakhstan but had even requested him as his deputy: this was the kiss of death. Relations had certainly been warm when Stalin received the Redens family before they set off for Alma-Ata. We know little about Redens’s role in the Terror but thousands in Moscow and Kazakhstan had been slaughtered on his watch. The arrival of Beria, his nemesis in Tiflis in 1931, was bad news but even without it, Stanislas would probably have been doomed.2

  Meanwhile Pavel Alliluyev’s job, as a tank forces commissar, placed him in harm’s way: close to the executed generals, he was also involved in spying on German tank production. When he saw the Soviet spy Orlov before his defection, Alliluyev warned him: “Don’t ever inquire about the Tukhachevsky affair. Knowing about it is like inhaling poison gas.” Then Pavel had been out in the Far East where the generals appealed to him and he had flown back, according to his daughter Kira, with evidence that proved their innocence. He clearly did not understand that evidence only existed to persuade others, not to prove guilt. Pavel is said to have put together a letter for Stalin, co-signed by three generals, suggesting the Terror be brought to a close. The generals’ timing seemed fortuitous; the Terror was ebbing. Stalin did not openly punish them, but he had clearly tired of Pavel’s interference.140

  After holidaying in Sochi, Pavel returned on 1 November. The next morning, Pavel ate breakfast and went to the office where he found that most of his department had been arrested, according to Svetlana: “He attempted to save certain people, trying to get hold of my father, but it was no use.” At two in the afternoon, Zhenya was called: “What did you give your husband to eat? He’s feeling sick.” Zhenya wanted to rush over but they stopped her. He was sent to the Kremlevka clinic. In the words of the official medical report, “When he was admitted, he was unconscious, cyanotic and apparently dying. The patient did not recover consciousness.” This was strange since the doctor who telephoned Zhenya to tell her this news said: “Why did it take you so long? He had something to tell you. He kept asking why Zhenya didn’t come. He’s already dead.” So died the brother who had given Nadya her pistol. The inconsistencies in an already suspicious death, at a time when medical murder was almost routine, makes foul play possible. Stalin kept the death certificate. Zhenya was later accused of murdering Pavel. Stalin sometimes accused others of his own crimes. We will never know the truth.

  “The next time I saw him,” Kira says, “was lying in state at the Hall of Columns. He was only 44, and he was lying there all sunburnt, very handsome with his long eyelashes.” Looking into the casket, Sergei Alliluyev mused that there was no more tragic thing than to bury your own children.3

  Redens himself headed back to Moscow where he arrived on 18 November. At Kuntsevo, Vasily heard Beria demand that Stalin let him arrest Redens. “But I trust Redens,” replied Stalin “very decisively.” To Vasily’s surprise, Malenkov supported Beria. This was the beginning of the alliance between these two who would not have pressed the arrest without knowing Stalin’s instincts: these scenes of pretend argument resemble the mooting exercises practised by trainee lawyers. Yet Stalin was highly suggestible. Redens had the misfortune, like Pavel Alliluyev, to be in two or three overlapping circles of suspicion. Beria is always blamed for turning Stalin against his other brother-in-law but there was more to it t
han that. Stalin had removed Redens from the Ukraine in 1932. He was close to Yezhov. And he was a Pole. Stalin listened to Beria and Malenkov and then said: “In that case, sort it out at the Central Committee.” As Svetlana put it, “My father would not protect him.” On the 22nd, Redens was arrested on his way to work and was never seen again.

  Anna Redens started phoning Stalin. She was no longer welcome at Zubalovo. She could not get through to Stalin. “Then I’ll call Voroshilov, Kaganovich and Molotov,” she sobbed. When the children arrived, they found their mother, hysterical at the disappearance of her beloved Stan, lying in bed reading Alexandre Dumas. She appealed to everyone until finally Stalin took her call. Stalin summoned her to the Little Corner. Redens “would be brought and we shall make an inquiry about all this,” but he made one condition: “And bring Grandfather Sergei Yakovlevich with you.” Sergei, who had now lost two children, no longer waited for Stalin on the sofa every night but he agreed to come. At the last moment, he backed out. Beria either threatened him, or perhaps Sergei thought Redens was guilty of something in his unsavoury work at the Lubianka: Redens’s son Leonid stressed that there were tensions between Old Bolsheviks like Sergei and the brash élite like Redens. Grandmother Olga went instead, a brave but foolish move since Stalin loathed interfering women.

  “Why have you come? No one called you!” he snarled at her. Anna shouted at Stalin, who had her removed.4 Redens and the Svanidzes were in jail; Pavel Alliluyev dead. Stalin had allowed the Terror to ravage his own circle. When the Bulgarian Communist Georgi Dmitrov appealed for some arrested comrades, Stalin shrugged: “What can I do for them, Georgi? All my own relatives are in prison too.” This is a revealing excuse. Certainly, with Pavel, Nadya’s pistol must have always been on his mind but so were his military connections and intercession for “Enemies.” Perhaps Stalin was settling private scores against his over-familiar, interfering family who reminded him of Nadya’s rejection. But he did not regard the Terror as a private spree: he was cleansing his encircled country of spies to safeguard his vast achievements before war broke out. His family were among the casualties. He regarded them as his own sacrifice as the supreme pontiff of Bolshevism. But he was also asserting his own separation from private ties and, perhaps refreshingly, shaking off old obligations of family and friendship141: his vendettas were those of the Party because, as he told Vasily, “I’m not Stalin . . . Stalin IS Soviet power!” But they also provided a living excuse for demanding that his comrades sacrifice their own families. Nonetheless, he could have saved anyone he wanted and he did not.5 The familial world of Stalin and his children was still shrinking.