Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  109 There has been a debate between those such as Robert Conquest who insisted that Stalin himself initiated and ran the Terror, and the so-called Revisionists who argued that the Terror was created by pressure from ambitious young bureaucrats and by the tensions between centre and regions. The archives have now proved Conquest right, though it is true that the regions outperformed their quotas, showing that the Revisionists were right, too, though missing the complete picture. The two views therefore are completely complementary.

  110 170,000 Koreans were also deported. Bulgarians and Macedonians were soon added. Stalin was delighted by the Polish operation, writing on Yezhov’s report: “Very good! Dig up and purge this Polish espionage mud in the future as well. Destroy it in the interest of the USSR!” If Poles and Germans took the brunt of this operation, other nationalities deported included Kurds, Greeks, Finns, Estonians, Iranians, Latvians, Chinese, returnees from the Harbin railway and Romanians. Most exotically, the NKVD shot 6,311 priests, lords and Communist officials, about 4 percent of the population in the satellite state of Mongolia where the Mongoloid parody of Stalin, Marshal Choibalsang, also arrested and shot his own Tukhachevsky, Marshal Demid.

  111 On 14 April 1937, Procurator-General Vyshinsky wrote to the Premier to inform him of a cluster of cases of cannibalism in Cheliabinsk in the Urals in which one woman ate a four-month-old child, another ate an eight-year-old with her thirteen-year-old, while yet another consumed her three-month-old baby.

  112 This is eerily like Hitler’s comment on the genocide of the Jews, referring to the Turkish slaughter of the Armenians in 1915: “After all, who today speaks of the massacre of the Armenians?”

  113 This reached its climax when sixty children aged between ten and twelve were accused of forming “a terrorist counter-revolutionary group” in Leninsk-Kuznetsk and were imprisoned for eight months, until the NKVD themselves were arrested and the children released.

  114 Stalin’s papers contain fascinating glimpses of his interventions: a father denounced his son to the police for having too many outrageous parties but the boy was arrested and embroiled in a case against Tomsky. The father appealed to Stalin who wrote on his note: “It’s necessary to change the punishment!” The father wrote to thank Stalin.

  115 Yezhov replied in black: “In addition to the copy of Uzakovsky’s report sent to you, I sent another one of the 7th Division of GUGB [State Security] about the activities of Chinese-Trotskyites. Yezhov.”

  116 His huge portraits were borne past the Mausoleum on all the State holidays. The pun on the resemblance of his name to the “steel gauntlet” had now spawned vast posters showing his iron grip “strangling the snakes” with the heads of Trotsky, Rykov and Bukharin. The other Yezhovite slogan read: “Yezhovy rukavitsy —rule with an iron rod!”

  117 Alexandra Kollontai, at that time sixty-five and Ambassador to Sweden, was a beautiful Bolshevik noblewoman who wrote the manifesto of feminism and free love, her novel Love of Worker Bees. Her scandalous sex life shocked and amused Stalin and Molotov. Several of her famous Bolshevik lovers were shot in the Great Terror. Yet she herself survived. Perhaps her letters to Stalin, always addressed to “highly respected Joseph Vissarionovich” with “friendly greetings from an open heart” with the flirtatious romanticism of a once beautiful woman, appealed to his chivalry. Similarly, Stalin muttered to Dmitrov about the veteran Bolshevik Yelena Stasova that “we shall probably arrest Stasova. Turned out she’s scum.” Yet she was allowed to survive and continued to write Stalin warm letters of gratitude into honourable old age. In the Stalin family too, the women usually survived (though they were arrested) but the men were decimated.

  118 In their generation, the proud exception to this narrow-minded hypocrisy were those rare Bolsheviks who combined Party discipline with European Bohemianism, the Foreign Commissar Maxim Litvinov and his English wife Ivy. She sneered openly at humbugs like Molotov and flaunted her promiscuity with a parade of Germanic lovers: “I don’t care a pin what anyone says . . . for I feel head and shoulders taller than anyone who can gloat on such outworn topics of scandal as who sleeps with whom.” Meanwhile Commissar Litvinov, the plump, rumpled and tough Jewish intellectual who had known Stalin a long time but was never close to him, started an affair with a “very pretty, decidedly vulgar and very sexy indeed” girl who lodged with them. She even accompanied him to diplomatic receptions and arrived at the office in tight riding breeches.

  119 The primitive interrogators tried to suit the crime to the criminal with often absurd results: on his arrest, the First Secretary of the Jewish Autonomous Oblast in Birobizhan was appropriately accused of poisoning Kaganovich’s gefilte fish during his visit there. Presumably, throughout the many republics of the USSR, the poison was secreted in the national dishes—from the sausages of the Baltics to the spicy soups of the Buriats and the lamb stews of the Tajiks.

  120 At the end of 1936, when Stalin inaugurated the new Constitution, Shumiatsky, the film boss, asked Molotov if he could record Stalin’s speech. On 20 November, Molotov gave permission. Maltsev, the chief of the All-Union Committee of Radiofication and Radiosound, reported joyfully to Stalin that the speech had been successfully recorded and approved. Now he wanted permission to make it into a gramophone record “for you to hear it personally.” Stalin agreed. But on 29 April 1937, when the terrified officials of the Gramophone Trust Factory listened to the gramophone, something was wrong with Stalin’s voice. They immediately reported to Poskrebyshev that there were: “1. Big noises. 2. Big intervals. 3. The absence of whole phrases. 4. Closed grooves. And 5. Jumps and lack of clarity.” The file also contained a nervous analysis of the sibilance of Stalin’s voice and how hard it was to render on gramophone. Worse, a thousand of these records had been manufactured. Some officials wanted to recall the discs but, typically for the period, the chief attacked this suggestion for its disrespect to Comrade Stalin’s voice. He thought it more respectful to distribute them regardless of the gaps, noises, jumps. The file ends with a report from Komsomolskaya Pravda that suggested that something very sinister had happened to Comrade Stalin’s voice at the Gramophone Factory where the insistence of Comrade Straik to “distribute the discs more speedily” was a “strange position.” He was obviously a wrecker and all the guilty wreckers at the factory “must be harshly punished.” No doubt the NKVD came to listen to Comrade Straik’s record collection.

  121 Khrushchev was as fanatical a Stalinist terrorist as it was possible to be during the thirties yet his ability to destroy incriminating documents, and his memoirs, have shrouded his real conduct in mystery. A. N. Shelepin, ex-KGB boss, testified in 1988 that Khrushchev’s death lists had been removed by the secret policeman I.V. Serov. Two hundred and sixty-one pages of Khrushchev’s papers were burned between 2 and 9 July 1954.

  122 Such absurdities abounded: in her terrible labour camp, Bukharin’s widow encountered this spirit when another prisoner informed on her because she owned a book named Dangerous Liaisons that was presumed to be a deadly espionage guide.

  123 After interviewing Andreyev and Dora Khazan’s daughter Natasha and hearing of his innocence of all crimes, the author came upon this damning file. Andreyev’s notes and letters have survived because unlike his fellow criminals, such as Kaganovich, Malenkov and Khrushchev, he was out of power after Stalin’s death when the others managed to destroy so many incriminating documents.

  124 Lenin, Cheka founder Felix Dzerzhinsky, and the Foreign Commissar until 1930, Chicherin, were hereditary noblemen, as were Molotov, Zhdanov, Sergo and Tukhachevsky, according to Peter the Great’s Table of Ranks which decreed rank until 1917. None were titled nobility.

  125 Martha and her mother had been invited to Tiflis for the celebration of the poet Rustaveli’s 750th anniversary by Timosha’s new lover, Academician Lupel. There, through a slit in the door, she had seen him arrested at the dead of night: “I saw five men take him away,” she remembered. Timosha’s later affair with Stalin’s court architect, Merzhan
ov, also ended in his arrest. “I’m cursed,” Timosha Peshkova exclaimed. “Everyone I touch is ruined.”

  126 Nadezhda Mandelstam wrote beautifully of how she and her husband had lain awake in the Writers’ Union building until the lift had passed their floor.

  127 After Stalin’s death, the Serebryakovs managed to get half the property returned to them but the Vyshinskys kept the other half. Thus today, sixty years after their father was shot by their neighbour, the Serebryakovs spend each weekend next to the Vyshinskys.

  128 There were two Rosa Kaganoviches: Lazar’s sister Rosa died young in 1924 while his niece Rosa lived in Rostov and then moved to Moscow where she still lives. It is possible that they met Stalin but they did not marry him.

  129 The ancient city of Samara had been renamed after Kuibyshev on his death in 1935.

  130 Did Stalin recall Postyshev’s slight cheekiness in 1931? When Stalin wrote to him to complain about the list of those to receive the Order of Lenin: “We give the Order of Lenin to any old shitters.” Postyshev replied cheerfully that the “shitters” were all approved by Stalin himself.

  131 Khrushchev, like other regional bosses such as Beria and Zhdanov, became the object of an extravagant local cult: a “Song of Khrushchev” soon joined the “Song for Beria” and odes to Yezhov in the Soviet songbook.

  132 His splendid gravestone in the Novodevichy Cemetery not far from Nadya Stalin’s grave gives no hint of his sinister end.

  133 He usually signed documents in tiny neat writing in a distinctive turquoise ink or on a turquoise typewriter that did not clash with Stalin’s blue or red crayons.

  134 The author is grateful to Alyosha Mirtskhulava, Beria’s Georgian Komsomol boss, and later Georgian First Secretary, for his interview in Tbilisi.

  135 The case in question concerned an investigation to find the person who had mistakenly burned the books of Lenin, Stalin and Gorky in a furnace: another example of the absurdity and deadliness of the Terror.

  136 In this case, Stalin backed Beria’s dismissal of the case against Shipping Commissar Tevosian but told Mikoyan: “Tell him the CC knows he was recruited by Krupp as a German agent. Everyone understands a person gets trapped . . . If he confesses it honestly . . . the CC will forgive him.” Mikoyan called Tevosian into his office to offer him Stalin’s trick but the Commissar refused to confess, which Stalin accepted. Tevosian was to be one of the major industrial managers of WWII.

  137 Her name was changed to that of Yevgenia’s first husband, Khayutin—but she remained loyal to her adoptive father into the next millennium. Natasha Yezhova survived after enduring terrible sufferings on her stepfather’s behalf. Vasily Grossman, the author of the classic novel Life and Fate, who knew the family, attending the salons with Babel and others, wrote a short story about Natasha’s tragic childhood. She became a musician in Penza and Magadan. In May 1998, she applied for Yezhov’s rehabilitation. Ironically she had a case since he was certainly not guilty of the espionage for which he was executed. Her appeal was denied. At the time of writing, she is alive.

  138 The switch between the two secret police chiefs was seamless: on the twenty-fourth, Dmitrov, the Comintern leader, was still discussing arrests with Yezhov at his dacha, but by nighttime on the twenty-fifth, he was working on the same cases with Beria at his house.

  139 Anna Larina spent twenty years in the camps. Her son Yury was eleven months old when she was arrested in 1937 and she did not see him again until 1956, just one of many heart-breaking stories.

  140 The other three generals who signed the letter were, apparently, Stalin’s Tsaritsyn crony, Grigory Kulik, and Commanders Meretskov and D. Pavlov. Commissar Savchenko also signed. Savchenko was executed in October 1941; the fates of the others are told later in this book. All suffered grievously at Stalin’s hands. Only Meretskov out-lived him.

  141 His old lover of 1913, “my darling” Tatiana Slavotinskaya, is an example: Stalin had protected her well into the thirties, promoting her in the Central Committee apparatus, but now the protection stopped abruptly. Her family was repressed and she was expelled from the House on the Embankment. Slavotinskaya was the grandmother of Yury Trifonov, author of the novel House on the Embankment.

  142 She remained a presence in the household until after the end of the war when she married an NKVD general and returned to Georgia where she had children. Her daughter still lives in Georgia.

  143 President Vladimir Putin’s grandfather was a chef at one of Stalin’s houses and revealed nothing to his grandson: “My grandfather kept pretty quiet about his past life.” As a boy, he recalled bringing food to Rasputin. He then cooked for Lenin. He was clearly Russia’s most world-historical chef since he served Lenin, Stalin and the Mad Monk.

  144 Stalin’s bodyguards, whose inconsistent but revealing memoirs were collected long after his death, were not sure about the Valechka relationship. When she became older, she married and, during Stalin’s later years, she complained of her husband’s jealous reproaches. After Stalin’s death, Valechka never spoke of their relationship but when she was asked if the opera singer Davydova ever visited Kuntsevo, her answer perhaps displayed a proprietorial sting: “I never saw her at the dacha . . . She’d have been thrown out!” Valechka was not a Party member.

  145 Vyshinsky reported that the arrest of hundreds of teenagers in Novosibirsk had been faked by the NKVD: “the children were innocent and have been released but three senior officials including the head of the NKVD and the town Procurator were guilty of ‘betraying revolutionary loyalty’ and expelled from the Party.” What should be done with them? On 2 January 1939, Stalin scribbled: “It’s necessary to have a public trial of the guilty.”

  146 In the ugly wooden chamber that had been created by vandalizing the sumptuous Alexandrovsky Hall in the Great Kremlin Palace.

  147 This blackmail against Malenkov, accusing him of noble connections, may have formed part of the basis of his alliance with Beria though Stalin knew of the evidence. “Think yourself lucky these documents are in my hands,” Beria told him. When Beria was arrested in June 1953, after Stalin’s death, these papers were given to Malenkov who destroyed them.

  148 On 5 February 1939, that shrewd observer of power, Svetlana Stalin, aged thirteen, listed the survivors of the Terror in a note: “1. To Stalin. 2. Voroshilov. 3. Zhdanov. 4. Molotov. 5. Kaganovich. 6. Khrushchev. Daily Order No. 8. I’m travelling to Zubalovo . . . leaving you on your own. Hold on to your bellies with an iron hand! Setanka, Mistress of the house.” The grandees each replied revealingly: “I obey. Stalin, the poor peasant. L. Kaganovich. The obedient Voroshilov. The diligent escapee Ukrainian N. Khrushchev. V. Molotov.”

  149 This sort of courage counted for something with Stalin. Litvinov, who was three years older than Stalin, could never curb his tongue. That cosmopolitan curmudgeon complained to his friends of Stalin’s “narrow-mindedness, smugness, ambitions and rigidity” while he called Molotov “a halfwit,” Beria “a careerist” and Malenkov “shortsighted.” Molotov said that Litvinov remained “among the living only by chance” yet Stalin always just preserved him, despite Molotov’s hatred for the much more impressive diplomat, because he was so respected in the West that he might be useful again. There was a story that Litvinov had saved Stalin from being beaten up by dockers in London in 1907: “I haven’t forgotten that time in London,” Stalin used to say.

  150 They planned to do the same to Litvinov but his English wife, Ivy, was terrified of imminent arrest and when she confided this to some American friends, the letter ended up on Stalin’s desk. He phoned Papasha: “You’ve an extremely courageous and outspoken wife. You should tell her to calm herself. She’s not threatened.”

  151 The first three Soviet Premiers were Russians. On Lenin’s death, Rykov succeeded him as PredSovnarkom even though Kamenev, a Jew, usually chaired the meetings. In 1930, Rykov was succeeded by Molotov. But Stalin refused the Premiership as much for political as for racial reasons.

  152 The comedy of the
se negotiations was neatly encapsulated in the question of the Order of the Bath. Drax had arrived without the relevant credentials, a mistake that told Stalin all he needed to know about Western commitment. At the very moment the credentials finally arrived, they had become utterly irrelevant. When Sir Reginald proudly read out his official titles and arrived at this noble order, the Soviet interpreter declaimed: “Order of the Bathtub.” Marshal Voroshilov, displaying both his overwhelming characteristics—childlike naïvety and heroic bungling capacity—interrupted to ask: “Bathtub?” “In the reign of our early kings,” Drax droned, “our knights used to travel round Europe on horseback, slaying dragons and rescuing maidens in distress. They would return home travel-stained and grimy and report . . . to the King [who] would sometimes offer a knight a luxury . . . A bath in the royal bathroom.” The Western democracies could not deliver the “price” of a Soviet alliance, namely to back up the Polish guarantee and deliver the Baltic States into Stalin’s sphere of influence. Perhaps they were right since this would still not guarantee stopping Hitler, while there seemed little point in saving Poland from the Huns to deliver her to the Tatars.