Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  Her daughter Natalya was told she had died naturally. Poskrebyshev brought up the girls himself with loving devotion. He kept photographs of Bronka around the house. When Natalya pointed at one of the photos and said “Mama,” Poskrebyshev burst into tears and ran out of the room. It was typical of the tragedies of the time that Natalya only discovered her mother had been shot when she was told at school by the daughter of Kozlovsky the singer. She sobbed in the lavatories. Poskrebyshev remarried.

  Bronka’s destruction did not affect Poskrebyshev’s relationship with Stalin or Beria: the Party was just. Stalin took a solicitous interest in Bronka’s daughter: “How’s Natasha?” he often asked his chef de cabinet. “Is she plump and sweet?” Years later when she could not do her homework, she called her father to ask his help. Someone else answered.

  “Can I speak to my father?” she asked.

  “He’s not here,” replied Stalin. “What’s the problem?”—and he solved her mathematical questions. The only awkwardness in Poskrebyshev’s apparent friendship with Beria was when the latter hugged little Natalya and sighed: “You’re going to be as beautiful as your mother.”

  Poskrebyshev “turned green,” struggled to control his emotions, and rasped: “Natalya, go and play.”2

  Before he turned to wantonly kill another of his friend’s wives, Stalin capriciously saved two old friends from death. Sergo Kavtaradze was an Old Bolshevik Leftist who had known Stalin since the turn of the century. He was an intelligent cosmopolitan Georgian married to Princess Sofia Vachnadze, whose godmother had been Empress Maria Fyodorovna, Nicholas II’s mother. They were an unusual couple. Kavtaradze consistently joined the oppositions yet Stalin always forgave him. Arrested in the late twenties, Stalin brought him back and ordered Kaganovich to help him. He was arrested again in late 1936, appearing on Yezhov’s death lists. His wife was also arrested. His daughter Maya, then eleven, thought both parents were already dead but she courageously wrote to Stalin to beg for their lives, signing her letters: “Pioneer Maya Kavtaradze.” Both Kavtaradzes were tortured but because Stalin had put a dash next to his old friend’s name on the death list, their lives were spared. Now, in late 1939, “Pioneer Kavtaradze” ’s letters reminded Stalin to ask Beria if his old friend was still alive.

  In the Lubianka, Kavtaradze was suddenly shaved by a barber, given a comfortable room, and a menu from which he could order any food he liked. Delivered to the Hotel Lux, he found his wife was there, a frail shadow of her former self—but alive. Their daughter arrived from Tiflis. Soon afterwards, Kavtaradze was called: “Comrade Stalin is waiting for you. If you’re ready, a car will pick you up in half an hour.” He was taken to Kuntsevo where Koba greeted him in the study: “Hello Sergo,” he said as if Kavtaradze had not been found guilty of involvement in a plot to kill him. “Where’ve you been?”

  “Sitting [in prison].”

  “Oh you found time to sit?” The Russian slang for being in prison is sidet—to sit—hence Stalin’s joke, a line he used frequently. After dinner, Stalin turned to him anxiously: “Nevertheless, you all wanted to kill me?”

  “Do you really think so?” Kavtaradze replied. Stalin just grinned. Afterwards, when he got home, Kavtaradze whispered to his wife: “Stalin’s sick.” A few weeks later, the family received a bizarre and revealing visitation.161

  The Kavtaradzes had some friends to dinner when the telephone rang at 11 p.m. Kavtaradze said he had to rush out and left without an explanation. His wife and their daughter Maya, fourteen, went to bed. At 6 a.m. Kavtaradze staggered into their three-room apartment on Gorky Street, still dizzy from drinking. “Where’ve you been?” his wife scolded him.

  “We’ve guests,” he announced.

  “You’re drunk!” Then she heard footsteps: Stalin and Beria tipsily walked in and sat down at the kitchen table. Vlasik stood guard at the front door. While Kavtaradze poured out drinks, his wife rushed into Maya’s room.

  “Wake up!” she whispered.

  “What’s wrong?” asked the schoolgirl. “They’ve come to arrest us at night?”

  “No, Stalin’s come.”

  “I won’t meet him,” retorted Maya who understandably hated him.

  “You must,” replied her mother. “He’s a historical personage.” So Maya got dressed and came into the kitchen. As soon as she appeared, Stalin beamed.

  “Ah, it’s you—‘Pioneer Kavtaradze.’ ” He recalled her letters appealing for her parents. “Sit on my lap.” She sat on Stalin’s knee. “Do you spoil her?”

  Maya was charmed: “He was so kind, so gentle—he kissed me on the cheek and I looked into his honey-coloured, hazel, gleaming eyes,” she recalls, “but I was so anxious.”

  “We’ve no food!” the little girl exclaimed.

  “Don’t worry,” said Beria. Ten minutes later, Georgian food was delivered from the famous Aragvi restaurant. Stalin looked closely at Kavtaradze’s wife, the princess born at the imperial court. Her hair was white.

  “We tortured you too much,” Stalin said.

  “Whoever mentions the past, let him lose his eyes,” she answered shrewdly, using the proverb Stalin had used to Bukharin. He asked Beria about Kavtaradze’s brother, also arrested, but they were too late: he had already died, like so many others, en route to Magadan.

  Kavtaradze started singing a Georgian song but he was out of tune.

  “Don’t, Tojo,” said Stalin, who nicknamed Kavtaradze, with his Oriental eyes, after the Japanese General Tojo. He started to sing himself “in a sweet tenor.” Maya was “shocked—there he was short and pock-marked. Now he was singing!” Then he announced: “I want to see the apartment,” and inspected it carefully. The feast continued until 10 a.m. and Maya missed school that day.

  Stalin appointed Kavtaradze to a publishing job that involved another prisoner, Shalva Nutsibidze, a celebrated Georgian philosopher. As a young man, Nutsibidze had once met Stalin. While in jail, Nutsibidze started translating the Georgian epic poem by Rustaveli, The Knight in the Panther Skin, into Russian. Every day, his work was taken from him and returned marked with the pen of an anonymous editor. Kobulov tortured him, tearing off his fingernails.

  Then he suddenly became friendly, telling the prisoner that during a recent meeting, Stalin had asked Beria if he knew what kind of bird the thrush was: “Ever heard of a thrush singing in his cage?” Beria shook his head. “It’s the same with poets,” Stalin explained. “A poet can’t sing in a cell. If we wish to have Rustaveli perfectly translated, free the thrush.” Nutsibidze was released and, on 20 October 1940, Kavtaradze picked him up in a limousine and the two “lucky stiffs” drove to the Little Corner to report to Poskrebyshev on the Rustaveli translation.

  When they were shown into the office, Stalin was smiling at them: “You’re Professor Nutsibidze?” he said. “You’ve been offended a bit but let’s not rake up the past,” and then he started to rave about the “magnificent translation of Rustaveli.” Sitting the two men down, Stalin handed the astounded professor a leather-bound draft of the translation, adding, “I’ve translated one couplet. Let’s see how you like it.” Stalin recited it. “If you really do like it, I give it to you as a present. Use it in your translation, but don’t mention my name. I take great pleasure in being your editor.” He then invited the two to dinner where they reminisced about the old days in Georgia.

  After many horns of wine, Nutsibidze recalled the political meeting where he had first met Stalin, declaiming his speech from memory. Stalin was delighted: “Extraordinary talent goes hand in hand with extraordinary memory!”162 He came round the table and kissed Nutsibidze on the forehead.3

  They were particularly fortunate “stiffs” because after the Ribbentrop Pact, Stalin liquidated the backlog of Yezhov cases, including Blackberry himself who confessed to being an English, Japanese and Polish spy. But he also denounced his wife’s literary lovers. Thus the indelible mark of Yevgenia’s kisses proved fatal long after her own exit. Sholokhov was protected by the penumbra of Sta
lin himself but Isaac Babel was arrested, telling his young wife: “Please see our girl grows up happy.”

  On 16 January 1940, Stalin signed 346 death sentences, a list of the tragic flotsam of Terror that combined monsters with innocents, including some of the outstanding talents of the arts, such as Babel, theatre director Meyerhold, and Yezhova’s lover, the journalist Koltsov (on whom Karpov in Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls is based), as well as Yezhov himself with his innocent brother, nephews and socialite mistress, Glikina, and the fallen magnate Eikhe. Most (though not Yezhov) were mercilessly tortured with the relish that Beria and Kobulov brought to their work at Sukhanov prison, Beria’s special realm which, ironically, had once been the St. Catherine’s Nunnery.

  “The investigators began to use force on me, a sick sixty-five-year-old man,” Meyerhold wrote to Molotov. “I was made to lie face down and then beaten on the soles of my feet and my spine with a rubber strap. They sat me on a chair and beat my feet from above . . . For the next few days when those parts of my legs were covered with extensive internal haemorrhaging, they again beat the red, blue and yellow bruises and the pain was so intense it felt as if boiling water was poured on . . . I howled and wept from pain. They beat my back . . . punched my face, swinging their fists from a great height . . . The intolerable physical and emotional pain caused my eyes to weep unending streams of tears . . .”

  Over the next few days, Stalin’s hanging judge Ulrikh sentenced all to “the highest measure of punishment” in perfunctory trials at Lefortovo prison before attending a Kremlin gala, starring the tenor Kozlovsky and the ballerina Lepeshinskaya. Babel was condemned as an “agent of French and Austrian intelligence . . . linked to the wife of Enemy of the People Yezhov.” At 1:30 a.m. on 27 January 1940, Babel was shot and cremated.

  Eikhe was subjected to one last session of “French wrestling” at Sukhanov prison. Beria and Rodos “brutally beat Eikhe with rubber rods; he fell but they picked him up and went on beating him. Beria kept asking him, “Will you confess to being a spy?” Eikhe refused. “One of Eikhe’s eyes had been gouged out and blood was streaming out of it but he went on repeating ‘I won’t confess.’ When Beria had convinced himself he could not get a confession . . . he ordered them to lead him away to be shot.”

  It was now Yezhov’s turn. On 1 February, Beria called his predecessor to his office at the Sukhanovka to propose that if he confessed at his trial, Stalin would spare him. To his meagre credit, Yezhov refused: “It’s better to leave this earth as an honourable man.”

  On 2 February, Ulrikh tried him in Beria’s office. Yezhov read out his last statement to Stalin, dedicated to the sacred order of Bolshevik chivalry. He denied all charges of spying for what he called “Polish landowners . . . English lords and Japanese samurai” but “I do not deny I drank heavily but I worked like a horse. My fate is obvious,” but he asked “one thing: shoot me quietly, without putting me through any agony.” Then he requested that his mother be looked after, “my daughter taken care of” and his innocent nephews spared. He finished with the sort of flourish that one might expect to find from a knight to his king at the time of the Round Table: “Tell Stalin that I shall die with his name on my lips.”

  He faced the Vishka less courageously than many of his victims. When Ulrikh pronounced the sentence, Yezhov toppled over but was caught by his guards, loaded into a Black Crow in the early hours of 3 February and driven to his special execution yard with the sloping floor and hosing facilities at Varsonofyevsky Lane. There Beria, the Deputy Procurator (N. P. Afanasev) and executioner, Blokhin, awaited him. Yezhov, according to Afanasev, hiccuped and wept. Finally his legs collapsed and they dragged him by the hands. That day, Stalin met Beria and Mikoyan for three hours, probably discussing economic matters, but there is no doubt that he would have wished to know the details of Blackberry’s conduct at the supreme moment.

  The ashes of these men, Yezhov the criminal, Babel the genius, were dumped into a pit marked “Common Grave Number One—unclaimed ashes 1930–42 inclusive” at old Donskoi Cemetery. Just twenty paces away there is a gravestone that reads: “Khayutina, Yevgenia Solomonovna 1904–1938.”4 Yezhov, Yevgenia and Babel lie close.163

  Yezhov’s eminence was eradicated from the memories of the time. Henceforth he was portrayed as a blood-crazed renegade killing innocents against Stalin’s wishes. The era was named the Yezhovshchina, Yezhov’s time, a word that Stalin probably coined for he was soon using it himself. Yagoda and Yezhov were both “scum,” thought Stalin. Yezhov was “a rat who killed many innocent people,” Stalin told Yakovlev, the aircraft designer. “We had to shoot him,” he confided to Kavtaradze. But after the war, Stalin admitted: “One can’t believe a lot of the evidence from 1937. Yezhov couldn’t run the NKVD properly and anti-Soviet elements penetrated it. They destroyed some honest people, our best cadres.”

  Looking back, he also questioned Beria’s Terror: “Beria runs too many cases and everyone confesses.” But Stalin was always aware that the NKVD invented evidence: he jested and grumbled about it but often he chose to believe it because he had already decided who was an Enemy. More often, he had created it himself. “Meyerhold was a huge talent,” Stalin reflected in 1950, but “our Chekists don’t understand artists who all have faults. The Chekists collect them and then destroy good people. I doubt Meyerhold was an Enemy of the People.” He protested too much. Stalin had carefully followed their careers. He disapproved of “frivolous” Babel and his Red Cavalry “of which he knows nothing”—and he signed the death lists: no ruler has supervised his secret police as intimately as he.

  Now Beria, cleaning the Augean stables of Yezhov’s detritus, brought Stalin the death sentence for Blokhin the executioner himself. Stalin refused Beria’s request, saying that this “chernaya rabota”—black work— was a difficult job but very important for the Party. Blokhin was spared to kill thousands more. Stalin’s brother-in-law Stanislas Redens (implicated by Yezhov) was shot on 12 February 1940.164 His wife Anna was still convinced he would return and often called Stalin and Beria to inquire. Finally Beria told her to forget her marriage. After all, it had never been registered . . .5

  30

  Molotov Cocktails: The Winter War and Kulik’s Wife

  Stalin was in high spirits after the Ribbentrop Pact but he remained dangerously paranoid, especially about the wives of his friends. In November 1939, the phone rang at the dacha of Kulik, the bungling Deputy Defence Commissar who had commanded the Polish invasion. He and his long-legged, green-eyed wife, Kira Simonich, said to be the finest looking in Stalin’s circle, were holding his birthday party attended by an Almanac de Gotha of the élite, from Voroshilov and the worker-peasant-Count Alexei Tolstoy, to the omnipresent court singer, Kozlovsky, and a flurry of ballerinas. Kulik answered it.

  “Quiet!” he hissed. “It’s Stalin!” He listened. “What am I doing? I’m celebrating my birthday with friends.”

  “Wait for me,” replied Stalin who soon arrived with Vlasik and a case of wine. He greeted everyone and then sat at the table, where he drank his own wine while Kozlovsky sang Stalin’s favourite songs, particularly the Duke’s aria from Rigoletto.

  Kira Kulik approached Stalin, chatting to him like an old friend. The most unlikely member of Stalin’s circle was born Kira Simonich, the daughter of a count of Serbian origins who had run Tsarist intelligence in Finland then been shot by the Cheka in 1919. After the Revolution she had married a Jewish merchant exiled to Siberia: she went with him and they then managed to settle in the south where she met Grigory Kulik, the stocky, “always half-drunk” bon vivant who had commanded Stalin’s artillery at Tsaritsyn, but whose knowledge of military technology was frozen in 1918. The Countess was his second wife: they fell in love on the spot, leaving their respective spouses—but she was trebly tainted, for she was an aristocrat with links to Tsarist intelligence and the ex-wife of an arrested Jewish merchant. Like Bronka, Kira Kulik chatted to Stalin informally and “shone at Kremlin parties,” recalled
one lady who was often there herself. “She was very beautiful. Tukhachevsky, Voroshilov, Zhdanov, Yagoda, Yezhov, Beria all paid court to her.” Naturally there were rumours that Stalin himself had made her his mistress.

  Now, by the piano at the party, Kira and other young women surrounded him: “We drink to your health, Joseph Vissarionovich,” said a famous ballerina, “and let me kiss you in the name of all women.” He kissed her in return, and toasted her. But then Kira Kulik made a mistake.

  When she was alone by the piano with just Stalin, she asked him to free her brother, a former Tsarist officer, from the camps. Stalin listened affably, then put on the gramophone, playing his favourites. Everyone danced except Stalin.165 Stalin gave Kulik a book inscribed “To my old friend. J Stalin,” but Kira’s approach, presuming on her familiarity and prettiness, set a mantrap in his suspicious mind.1

  Days later, Kulik ordered the artillery barrage that commenced the Soviet invasion of Finland, the fourth country in their sphere of influence, which like the Baltic States had been part of the Russian Empire until 1918 and which now threatened Leningrad.

  On 12 October, a Finnish delegation met Stalin and Molotov in the Kremlin to hear the Soviet demands for the cession of a naval base at Hango. The Finns refused the Soviet demands, much to Stalin’s surprise. “This cannot continue for long without the danger of accidents,” he said. The Finns replied that they needed a five-sixths majority in their Parliament. Stalin laughed: “You’re sure to get 99 percent!”

  “And our votes into the bargain,” joked Molotov. Their last meeting ended with less humour: “We civilians,” threatened Molotov, “can see no further . . . Now it’s the turn of the military . . .”

  During dinner with Beria and Khrushchev at his flat, Stalin sent Finland his ultimatum. Molotov and Zhdanov, who was in charge of Baltic policy, the navy, and the defence of Leningrad, backed him. Mikoyan told a German diplomat that he had warned the Finns: “You should be careful not to push the Russians too far. They have deep feelings in regard to this part of the world and . . . I can only tell you that we Caucasians in the Politburo are having a great deal of difficulty restraining the Russians.” When the ultimatum ran out, they were still drinking in the Kremlin. “Let’s get started today,” said Stalin, sending Kulik to command the bombardment. The very presence of Kulik at any military engagement seemed to guarantee disaster.