Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  248 The chauffeurs of the leaders were very pleased when their bosses were invited to Stalin’s place. Voroshilov was now invited less often than before the war. “My old man ain’t invited there very much anymore,” his veteran chauffeur would complain.

  249 This resembles the blinding in one eye of Marshal Masséna by the Emperor Napoleon on a shooting expedition. The incident convinced Beria and Khrushchev even more that Stalin’s shooting tales were lies and that he could not shoot at all.

  250 Vlasik and Lieut.-Gen. Sasha Egnatashvili, the trusted son of the Gori innkeeper and Keke’s protector, were probably responsible for Stalin’s food which was prepared at an MGB laboratory named “The Base” and then marked “No poisonous elements found.” A recent book claims that Egnatashvili was Stalin’s food taster, which is apparently a myth. Stalin however often did get his entourage to try food and wine before he did. When he arrived at a party, he brought his own box of wine and his own cigarettes which he opened himself. He would only eat or drink if he had broken the seal himself, leaving the food, unfinished wine and cigarettes to be divided up by Vlasik. The waste was vast; the temptation for venality irresistible but dangerous. Vlasik could never resist such goodies.

  251 This male slow-dancing symbolizes the sinister degeneracy of Stalin’s dictatorship but it was not unique. In November 1943, at President Roosevelt’s Thanksgiving party in Cairo, just before their departure to meet Stalin in Teheran, there was a shortage of female dancers. So Churchill happily danced with FDR’s military assistant General Edwin “Pa” Watson.

  252 They were so pleased with these sessions that they made a record of this murderous boy band with Voroshilov on lead vocals, backed up by Zhdanov on piano. There one can actually hear the fine voices and tinkling piano of a night at Kuntsevo. This remarkable recording is in the possession of the Zhdanov family.

  253 There was a little villa down the steps on the cliffside for Svetlana. When Stalin saw it, he

  254 Mikoyan too felt his icy disapproval. He sensed his two old comrades were closet Rightists, absurd in Molotov’s case. But during the complex arguments about whether to strip Germany of its industry or build the eastern sector as a satellite, and the endless crises of famine and grain, Mikoyan had become a moderating voice. When Mikoyan did not report properly from the Far East, he received another sharp note from Stalin: “We sent you to the Far East not so you could fill your mouth with water [say nothing] and not send information to Moscow.”

  255 It was Shakhurin whose son had killed his girlfriend and then himself on Kamennyi Most in 1943.

  256 Abakumov appears as the consummate cunning courtier, utterly submissive to Stalin’s mysterious whims, in Solzhenitsyn’s novel of the post-war Terror, The First Circle, and as a shrewd and debauched secret-police careerist in Rybakov’s Fire and Ashes, the last volume of his Children of the Arbat trilogy.

  257 Stalin himself soon retired as Armed Forces Minister, handing this to Bulganin, another ally of Zhdanov who hated Malenkov because he had removed him from the Western Front in 1943. The ruling inner circle of Five (Stalin, Molotov, Mikoyan, Malenkov and Beria) gradually expanded to embrace Zhdanov, Voznesensky, Bulganin and Kuznetsov, regardless of whether they were yet formally Politburo members.

  258 In late 1946, Zhdanov suffered heart trouble and had to rest in Sochi, reporting to Stalin on 5 January 1947, “Now I feel much better . . . I don’t want to end the course of treatment . . . I ask you to add 10 days to my holiday . . . Let me return the 25th . . . For which I’ll be enormously grateful. Greetings! Your Andrei Zhdanov.”

  259 Zhdanov discussed the campaign with his son Yury, who had studied chemistry, taken a master’s degree in philosophy—and remained Stalin’s ideal young man and his dream son-in-law. Zhdanov explained that “after the war, with millions dead and the economy destroyed, we have to form a new concept of spiritual values to give a foundation to a devastated country, based on classical culture . . .” Zhdanov, raised on nineteenth-century “authors from Pushkin to Tolstoy, composers like Haydn and Mozart,” sought “an ideological basis in the classics.”

  260 “I have fulfilled the orders according to Comrade Stalin’s instructions which I wrote down about the play,” Simonov wrote to Poskrebyshev on 9 February 1949, delivering the work for inspection.

  261 Eisenstein died before he could shorten the beard, cut the kiss and show why The Terrible “needed to be cruel.” This was a mercy since it seems unlikely he would have survived the anti-Semitic purge of 1951–53.

  262 The first two candidates to lead this wartime PR campaign, Polish leaders of the Bund ( Jewish Socialist Party), V. Alter and G. Ehlich, demanded too much and were arrested, respectively being shot and committing suicide in prison.

  263 Fefer was the author of an absurd poem during WWII called “I a Jew” in which he praised the great Jewish Bolsheviks from King Solomon to Marx, Sverdlov and “Stalin’s friend Kaganovich” which no doubt enormously embarrassed the latter.

  264 Zhdanov’s chief ideological anti-Semite was the tall, thin and ascetic CC Secretary Mikhail Suslov, who had played a key role in the Caucasian deportations and then served as Stalin’s proconsul in the Baltics which he brutally purged after the war. Working alternately under both Zhdanov and Malenkov, he became one of Stalin’s youngish protégés.

  265 Churchill himself had bouts of jealousy of his generals: “Monty wants to fill the Mall when he gets his baton! And he will not fill the Mall,” Churchill told Sir Alan Brooke on his way back from Moscow in October 1944. “He will fill the Mall because he is Monty and I will not have him filling the Mall!” It was, wrote Brooke, “a strange streak of almost unbelievable petty jealousy on his part . . . Those that got between him and the sun did not meet his approval.” There was a great tradition of rulers jealous of, and threatened by, brilliant but overmighty generals: Emperor Justinian humiliated Belisarius; Emperor Paul did the same to Suvorov.

  266 The size and quality of their Stalin portrait was as much a mark of rank as the stars on an officer’s shoulder boards: a life-size oil original by a court artist like Gerasimov was the sign of a potentate. Budyonny and Voroshilov also boasted life-size portraits of themselves in military splendour on horseback with sabre by Gerasimov. These “grandees” were now so pompous, recalled Svetlana, that they made “authoritative speeches” on “any pretext,” even at lunch in their own homes while their families “sighed with boredom.”

  267 Nina Adzhubei joined the élite herself when her son married Khrushchev’s daughter, Rada. When Khrushchev became Soviet leader, Alexei Adzhubei became powerful as his father-in-law’s adviser and Izvestiya editor.

  268 Although Stalin was cynical about the renaming of places after his late magnates, he decided to build a statue and rename a region, street and factory after Shcherbakov. The original draft suggested naming a town after him, too, but Stalin crossed that out, scribbling: “Give his name to a cloth factory.” On 9 December 1947, the Politburo set annual salaries of the Premier and President at 10,000 roubles; Deputy Premiers and CC Secretaries 8,000 roubles. Stalin’s salary packets just piled up, unspent, in his desk at Kuntsevo.

  269 When Starostin was finally returned to his camp (where he ran the soccer team), Vasily hired the famous coach of Dynamo Tiflis and managed to make it to fourth place in 1950 and the semi-finals of the USSR Cup. He favoured Stalinist punishments and plutocratic incentives: when his team lost 0–2, he ordered their plane to dump them in the middle of nowhere, far from Moscow, as a punishment; when the team won, a helicopter landed on the field filled with gifts. When he bothered to turn up to his air-force command, he ruled there too with wild generosity and grim terror. Thanks to Zurab Karumidze for these anecdotes of his father-in-law, Vasily’s football manager.

  270 Not only could Stalin not feed his civilians but his correspondence with Beria and Serov (in Germany) shows that the Soviets were anxious that they could not feed their army in Germany, let alone the East Germans.

  271 Like s
o many of Stalin’s febrile fears, there was substance here: the Ottoman Sultans had controlled the Black Sea through their control of Crimea. Catherine the Great and Prince Potemkin annexed the Crimea in 1783 for the same reason, just as the Anglo-French armies landed there in 1853 to undermine Russia. Khrushchev controversially donated Crimea to Ukraine in 1954, a decision that almost caused a civil war in the 1990s between Ukrainians and those who wished to be ruled by Russia.

  272 It was not long before Zhenya learned that her own husband was an MGB agent who had informed on her ever since their marriage, but every élite family had its informer. She divorced him.

  273 Grigory Morozov, who became a respected Soviet lawyer and always behaved with great discretion and dignity, refused to be interviewed for this book, saying, “I never want to relive 1947 again.” He died in 2002.

  274 Stalin had always taken a great interest in longevity. In 1937, he had sponsored Professor Alexander Bogomolov’s work into the phenomenon of the extraordinary life-spans of the people of Georgia and Abkhazia. Stalin is said to have believed this was due to water from glaciers and their diet—he therefore drank special glacial water.

  275 Most of Stalin’s houses were reached through an archway of the security building (though not Lake Ritsa and New Athos) before emerging in a lush garden with privet hedges and a path that led up to a Mediterranean-style villa surrounded by a veranda. Their biggest room was always the high-ceilinged wood-panelled dining room that boasted a long table that could be made smaller. All were painted a sort of military green, perhaps to camouflage them from the sky. All were virtually invisible, hidden up narrow lanes, and so concealed within palm and fir trees that it was hard to see them even from their own garden. Virtually all of them had their own jetties and all had summerhouses where Stalin worked and held dinners. All contained the tell-tale billiard room which was usually combined with a cinema, the film being projected out of little wooden windows across the billiard table onto the far wall. All had many bedrooms with divans and vast bathrooms with tiny baths made to fit Stalin’s height. All had been built or refashioned for Stalin by his court architect Miron Merzhanov who lived with Martha Beria’s mother, Timosha, Gorky’s daughter-in-law and Yagoda’s love. Merzhanov was arrested in the late forties like all of Timosha’s previous lovers.

  276 This is based on Charkviani’s memoirs. Mgeladze’s memoirs, that almost rank alongside Mikoyan’s for their intimacy, have only just been published in Georgia. The Georgian and Abkhazian bosses were naturally rivals: in the case of Beria versus Lakoba, the Tbilisi boss destroyed the Sukhumi boss but it worked the other way round with Charkviani and Mgeladze.

  277 Zhdanov was not the only one: Andreyev, just fifty-two, fell ill in 1947 though he remained an active Politburo member until 1950; he lost his position in 1952.

  278 Stalin had stayed with Troyanovsky’s father Alexander in Vienna in 1913, appointed him first Soviet Ambassador to Washington and protected him during the Terror. Stalin liked but never quite trusted Troyanovsky who was an ex-Menshevik. Once he crept up on him, put his hands over his eyes and whispered, “Friend or foe?” In 1948, young Troyanovsky’s career as Stalin’s interpreter came to an abrupt end when Molotov suddenly moved him in order to protect him. His father, the old diplomat, had been playing bridge and criticizing the leadership, with the indomitable Litvinov. It was a dangerous time. Later Troyanovsky became Khrushchev’s foreign affairs adviser. This account is based on an interview with him. He died in 2003.

  279 The man in charge of the operation was Lavrenti Tsanava, black-haired with a dapper moustache, one of the Georgians Beria had brought to Moscow. Like so many in the Cheka, he was a criminal. Those who knew him well could only say that “he was a beast.” His real name was Djandjugava and he had been convicted for murder until Beria rescued him and he became boss of the Belorussian MGB. He did not prove a particularly loyal protégé since he was now close to Abakumov. After Stalin’s death, he was arrested and executed.

  280 The “Aunties” were in Vladimir prison. Zhenya Alliluyeva wanted to commit suicide and swallowed stones but survived. Like so many others, she was kept alive by the kindness of strangers. A Polish prisoner in the neighbouring cell knocked in prison code “Live for your children.”

  281 Perhaps Stalin was affected by Zhdanov’s death. He re-named the dead man’s birthplace, Mariupol on the Black Sea, Zhdanov. According to the bodyguards, after Zhdanov’s funeral, Molotov was worried about Stalin’s health and asked them not to let him garden. When Stalin discovered this interference in his private life, he mistrusted Molotov all the more.

  282 Some Jews were sacked. Kaganovich continued as Deputy Premier and Politburo member but his elder brother Yuli lost his job. Like Polina, Kaganovich’s grandson recalls that Lazar too remembered the Yiddish of his childhood: when he met the German Communist Ernest Thalman he tried to use it. The “second lady of the state,” Andreyev’s wife Dora Khazan, was sacked as Deputy Minister of Textiles and General Khrulev’s Jewish wife was arrested. Mekhlis, like Kaganovich, continued as Minister of State Control and only retired in 1950 after a stroke. The Jewish Boris Vannikov continued to run the First Directorate of Sovmin in charge of the nuclear project.

  283 Shamberg “was heartbroken,” according to his friend Julia Khrushcheva. Both Svetlana Stalin and Volya Malenkova are adamant that they ended unhappy marriages but there can have been no greater incentive to end an unhappy Jewish marriage than the seething anti-Semitic paranoia of Stalin. Stalin did not need to say a word. The young people knew what to do. To Malenkov’s meagre credit, he managed to protect the Shambergs themselves, hiding the boy’s father Mikhail in the provinces. “Volya” was a name invented by Malenkov, meaning “Will” as in the People’s Will.

  284 On 22 August 1946, Stalin listened to the weather forecast and was infuriated to hear that it was completely wrong. He therefore ordered Voroshilov to investigate the weather forecasters to discover if there was “sabotage” among the weathermen. It was an absurd job that reflected Stalin’s disdain for the First Marshal who reported the next day that it was unjust to blame the weather forecasters for the mistakes.

  285 These dangers were perfectly demonstrated in 1991 when Boris Yeltsin used his Russian Presidency to demolish Gorbachev’s USSR. The moving of the capital back to Leningrad, city of Zinoviev and Kirov, had been a deadly issue in Russian politics ever since Peter the Great. Men died for it in the eighteenth century and they would die for it in 1949. Stalin was also suspicious of the popular heroism of Kuznetsov and the city of Leningrad itself during WWII. It represented an alternative totem of military patriotism to himself and Moscow.

  286 Meanwhile just across the landing, in another apartment at Granovsky, a similar discussion in this tiny world was going on: Rada Khrushcheva, whose father was still in Kiev, was staying with her father’s friends the Malenkovs. She wanted to go to the wedding, but Malenkov, who knew how doomed Kuznetsov was, refused to give her the limousine to take her there. “I won’t give you the car—you’re not studying well.” But Rada went under her own steam.

  287 “Dear Svetochka,” Stalin wrote to Svetlana in hospital on May 1950. “I got your letter. I’m glad you got off so lightly. Kidney trouble is a serious business. To say nothing of having a child. Where did you ever get the idea I’d abandoned you? It’s the sort of thing people dream up. I advise you not to believe your dreams. Take care of yourself. Take care of your daughter too. The State needs people even those born prematurely. Be patient a little longer—we’ll see each other soon. I kiss you my Svetochka. Your ‘little papa.’ ” He did not devote all his time to the Leningrad Case. During these days, he also supervised the creation of the new Soviet Encyclopaedia, deciding every detail from its quality of paper to its contents. When the editor asked if he should include “negative persons” such as Trotsky, he joked, “We’ll include Napoleon, but he was a big scoundrel!”

  288 Sergo and Alla were convinced this was “an intrigue by Malenkov and Beria
who tricked Stalin. It’s amazing we believed this,” recalls Sergo. “But we never ONCE spoke about the case until after Stalin’s death.” His father allowed Sergo to see Kuznetsov’s son but not his wife because he knew she too would be arrested. As for the Kremlin children who lived in Granovsky Street, they noticed that suddenly their neighbours, the Voznesenskys and Kuznetsovs, had gone. “But no one mentioned it,” said Igor Malenkov, whose father was responsible. “I just concentrated on reading about sport.” Julia Khrushcheva “used to play with Natasha, Voznesensky’s daughter. Soon after her father’s arrest, I brought her home to our flat. But my mother said nothing.” The etiquette of unpersonage differed from family to family: while Natasha Poskrebysheva went on playing with Natasha Voznesenskaya, Nadya Vlasik “crossed the road whenever she saw her.” I am especially grateful to Sergo Mikoyan for sharing his account of this story.

  289 They were now the heart of Stalin’s new inner “quintet,” along with Beria and Bulganin. Kaganovich enjoyed a partial return to favour. On Sundays, those two fat bureaucrat friends, Khrushchev and Malenkov, took bracing walks up Gorky Street, surrounded by phalanxes of secret policemen.

  290 Mao had brought a treasure trove of Chinese gifts and several carriages of rice. The lacquer ornaments still hang on the walls of Molotov’s retirement flat on Granovsky and Stalin divided the rice among his courtiers. In return, Stalin presented him with the names of his Soviet agents in the Chinese Politburo. Back in Peking, Mao swiftly liquidated them.

  291 Emelian Pugachev was the Cossack pretender claiming to be the dead Emperor Peter 111 who led a massive peasant rebellion against Catherine the Great in 1773–74.

  292 Stalin admired Chou and President Liu Shao-chi as the most “distinguished” of Mao’s men but he thought that Marshal Chu-Teh was a Chinese version of “our Voroshilov and Budyonny.”