Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  Lazar Kaganovich, a brawny and handsome Jewish cobbler, was Stalin’s coarse, energetic, cruel and intelligent deputy in the 1930s. Here during the famine that accompanied collectivisation, he personally leads an expedition into the Siberian countryside to search for grain hidden by peasants. The pace of Stalin’s campaigns was punishing: Kaganovich (below, in middle) falls asleep afterwards surrounded by his officials and secret policemen.

  The magnates were so close they were like a family: “Uncle Abel” Yenukidze (left) was Nadya’s godfather, Stalin’s old friend, a senior official and a sybaritic bachelor with a taste for ballerinas. Stalin came to resent his familiarity. Voroshilov (on the right), dapper, good-natured, stupid, envious and brutal, made his name in the Battle of Tsaritsyn and, in 1937, supervised the massacre of about 40,000 of his own officers.

  In 1933, the first year after Nadya’s death, Stalin’s holiday was recorded by the secret police in a special private album given to him afterwards: it shows the surprising intimacy and informality of his life during the holiday months. Stalin particularly enjoyed picnics. Here he and Voroshilov (in braces) go camping (above). Stalin adored gardening, weeding at his Sochi dacha (left)—he loved roses, but mimosas were his favourites. He was less keen on hunting, but (below) sets off with (from left) Budyonny, Voroshilov and his Chekist crony Evdokimov.

  Holidays were the best time to get to know Stalin: there was frantic networking among the grandees—even the most trivial activities were politically significant if they brought the courtiers close to the Boss. Young Lavrenti Beria, Georgian leader and vicious sadist, offered to help weed the gardens: placing an axe in his belt (above), he told Stalin that there was no tree that he would not chop down. Stalin understood.

  Stalin with Lakoba and Kirov, embarking on a fishing and shooting trip on the Black Sea which was to end in a mysterious assassination attempt—did Beria arrange it? Stalin inspects the fishing catch.

  Molotov, Premier during the 1930s, was the second most important leader after Stalin, who enjoyed teasing him. He was dominated by his wife Polina, to whom he wrote passionate love letters. Here on holiday he plays tennis with his family; in winter, he pulled his spoilt daughter on her sledge. But this Soviet Robespierre believed in terror and never regretted signing the death warrants of the wives of his friends. Stalin nicknamed him “Molotstein”—or more fondly, “our Vecha.”

  This is how Stalin ruled his empire: with his family and friends around him, sitting out in the sun at the Sochi dacha, reading hundreds of pages and writing his orders in red crayon, while his henchmen fight brutal duels for his favour. Beria stands like a guard behind him, having already fallen out with his patron Lakoba (right), while Svetlana (who called Beria “Uncle Lara”) plays around them. Within five years, Lakoba and his entire family were dead.

  1934–1941

  Stalin’s friendship was suffocating. After Nadya’s death, Sergei Kirov, the handsome, easygoing Leningrad boss, became Stalin’s closest friend—here, he holidays with Stalin and Svetlana at Sochi. But there was tension when Kirov became dangerously popular. Did Stalin arrange his death?

  Even before Kirov’s assassination, Andrei Zhdanov, ebullient, burly yet frail, pretentious, self-important and ruthless, became Stalin’s favourite—the only other magnate who qualified as his “fellow intellectual.” Here Zhdanov joins the family, probably at the Coldstream dacha (from left): Vasily, Zhdanov, Svetlana, Stalin and Yakov. Right: On the same occasion, Stalin and Svetlana.

  The Court of the Red Tsar in the mid-1930s. Stalin is surrounded by his male comrades and the circle of outspoken, bossy women who ultimately became over-familiar and paid the price. On 21 December 1934, still reeling from the assassination of Kirov, the courtiers, family and grandees gathered for Stalin’s birthday at his Kuntsevo dacha and were photographed by General Vlasik. Lakoba and Beria arrived late. (Back row standing, from left): Stan Redens; Kaganovich; Molotov; Alyosha Svanidze; Anna Alliluyeva Redens; Vlas Chubar; Dora Khazan (married to Andreyev); Andrei Andreyev; Zinaida Ordzhonikidze; Pavel Alliluyev. (Middle Row): Maria Svanidze; Maria Kaganovich; Sashiko Svanidze; Stalin; Polina Molotova; Voroshilov. (Front row): unknown, possibly Shalva Eliava; Lakoba; possibly Lakoba’s wife; Sergo Ordzhonikidze; Zhenya Alliluyeva; Bronislava Poskrebysheva; unknown; and (at the bottom front) Beria; Mikoyan and Poskrebyshev.

  Stalin’s women: his beaming mistress Zhenya Alliluyeva sits at his feet in her lace collar; she said what she liked to Stalin and it made her enemies. Pretty Bronislava Poskrebysheva sits to the right of Zhenya. Bronislava’s daughter claims her mother was also Stalin’s mistress. Nonetheless she was liquidated.

  Stalin micro-managed the theatre as he dominated cinema, literature and politics. The grandees ate in the avant-loge behind the box in between scenes. Here in the former imperial box at the Bolshoi sit (from left): Voroshilov, Kaganovich, Stalin, Sergo Ordzhonikidze, Mikoyan and their wives.

  Stalin’s mother Keke possessed the same sardonic and mocking wit as her son. They were not close but Stalin sent dutiful letters, leaving Beria to act as his surrogate son. Shortly before her death when Stalin was on holiday in Georgia, Beria arranged for him to visit the ailing Keke. Former friends, now bitter rivals, Beria and Lakoba sit behind mother and son in her bedroom.

  Like three boulevardiers in the sun, Beria, the Caucasian viceroy (centre), hosts Voroshilov and Mikoyan (right) in Tiflis for the Rustaveli Festival at the height of the Terror, 1937.

  A Jewish jeweller’s son with a knowledge of poisons and a ruthless ambition, Genrikh Yagoda was the NKVD boss who had reservations about the Terror. Stalin threatened to punch him in the face. Yagoda enjoyed the good life: collecting wines, growing orchids, courting Gorky’s daughter-in-law, amassing ladies’ underwear, and buying German pornographic films and obscene cigarette holders. Left to right: Yagoda in uniform, Kalinin, Stalin, Molotov, Vyshinsky, Beria.

  Marshal Semyon Budyonny, swaggering Cossack horseman and hero of Tsaritsyn, famous for his handlebar moustaches, white teeth and equine level of intelligence, poses with Kaganovich (on the left) and Stalin among swooning females. Budyonny proved a better general than most of Stalin’s cavalry cronies, but he was happiest breeding horses, which he believed were more useful than tanks.

  The two most depraved monsters of Stalin’s court. At the Seventeenth Congress in 1934 when they joined the leadership (but before their rise to supreme power), Beria and Yezhov, a rising Central Committee official, hug for the camera. Yezhov was an ambitious fanatic, good-natured, if prone to illness, a bisexual dwarf who was liked by everyone until he was promoted to NKVD boss in 1936 and became Stalin’s frenzied killer. Beria was an unscrupulous but able and intelligent secret policeman. In 1938, he was brought to Moscow to destroy Yezhov, whose execution he supervised.

  Ascendant grandee Yezhov (hugging his adopted daughter Natasha) and his promiscuous literary wife Yevgenia, who slept with writers from Isaac Babel to Mikhail Sholokhov, entertain their powerful friend, Sergo Ordzhonikidze. Yezhov would soon help Stalin harass Sergo to his death. Yevgenia Yezhova became the “black widow” of Stalin’s circle: many of her lovers, including Babel, died because of their connection to her. She sacrificed herself to try to save their daughter Natasha.

  Sergo and Yezhov

  As the Terror gained pace, Sergo Ordzhonikidze clashed with Stalin. A shot rang out in Sergo’s flat. His mysterious death solved a problem for Stalin, who rushed to his Kremlin apartment where Sergo was lifted onto his table for this photograph. Stalin, Zhdanov, Kaganovich, Mikoyan and Voroshilov pose with the body. Kaganovich and Mikoyan were especially close to Sergo and look particularly shocked.

  In 1937, at the height of the Great Terror, two young magnates join the leadership: Yezhov, now NKVD boss in full uniform as Commissar-General of State Security (second from right) and (far right) his friend Nikita Khrushchev, newly appointed Moscow boss and later one of Stalin’s successors, accompany Molotov, Kaganovich, Stalin, Mikoyan and Kalinin. Stalin trusted the
ruthless bumpkin Khrushchev, who described himself as the Leader’s “pet.” He idolised Stalin.

  Stalin regarded himself as an intellectual. He persuaded the famous novelist Gorky to return to the Soviet Union to become the regime’s great writer, giving him a mansion in Moscow and two dachas outside. Gorky’s house became the literary venue for the Politburo, who visited regularly. There Stalin told writers to become “engineers of human souls.” Here Stalin and Molotov (second from left) take tea with Gorky. When Stalin became disenchanted with Gorky, his death in 1936 proved convenient.

  When she tipsily dropped a cream cake on his tunic, Poskrebyshev fell in love with a pretty, glamorous and well-connected young doctor, Bronislava, who became familiar with Stalin and his family. But her Jewish Lithuanian origins, her friendship with Yezhov’s wife and, worst of all, her distant connection to Trotsky led to her arrest by Beria and her execution. Poskrebyshev wept when he heard her name, but remained working at Stalin’s side, on good terms with Beria—and managed to remarry. Poskrebyshev with Bronislava (right) and her sister.

  More powerful than many a magnate, Alexander Poskrebyshev (right) was Stalin’s chef de cabinet for most of his reign. This former male nurse and master of detail ran the office and kept the secrets, while at the Leader’s dinners Stalin challenged him to drinking contests, nicknamed him the “commander-in-chief” and laughed when he was dragged vomiting from the table.

  Poskrebyshev ran the politics but General Nikolai Vlasik, Stalin’s chief bodyguard and court photographer, ran his home life. This hard-drinking debauchee with a harem of “concubines,” also acted as Vasily Stalin’s father figure. Here, just before the war, is Vlasik (on the left), with Stalin’s doomed son Yakov, probably at Kuntsevo.

  Stalin remained close and affectionate with Svetlana, but by her early teens at the end of the 1930s, she was maturing early and this alarmed her father. When she sent him this photograph of her sporting her Young Pioneer’s uniform, he sent it back with a note saying, “Your expression is not suitable for someone your age.” When she fell in love with an older man in the middle of the Second World War, Stalin was appalled and it destroyed their relationship forever. Henceforth his fondest epithet to her was “You little fool.”

  1941–1945

  Stalin was shocked and bewildered by Hitler’s attack, but after a crisis Stalin assumed the role he believed was made for him: supreme warlord. Initially, Stalin worked with his magnates and generals in an almost collegiate atmosphere before success allowed him to play the military genius. Here Stalin runs the war assisted by (standing, from left): Bulganin (in uniform), Mikoyan, Khrushchev, Andreyev, Voznesensky, Voroshilov (in uniform) and Kaganovich; (seated, from left): Shvernik, Molotov, Beria and Malenkov.

  The outstanding military partnership of the war: in late 1942, after his bungles had caused a series of unnecessary disasters, Stalin appointed Georgi Zhukov his deputy. He admired his military gifts, energy and brutal drive. Zhukov played a decisive role in the victories of Moscow, Leningrad, Stalingrad and Berlin. At the victory parade, Stalin allowed Zhukov to take the salute, but afterwards, jealousy and paranoia led him to demote and humiliate his greatest general. Here in 1945, Stalin places Zhukov on his right, but is flanked on the other side by his “political” Marshals, Voroshilov, who proved brave but inept, and Bulganin, who rose ruthlessly but without trace to become heir apparent.

  Stalin as the arbiter of the Grand Alliance, playing Roosevelt against Churchill: here at Teheran in 1943, a grinning Voroshilov stands behind his master while General Alan Brooke (behind Churchill and Roosevelt) glances sardonically at their unsavoury ally.

  Churchill and Stalin at Yalta, followed by General Vlasik.

  At the Potsdam Conference, Stalin, resplendent in his white Generalissimo’s uniform, poses with Churchill, who was about to be thrown out by the British electorate, and the new U.S. President Harry Truman, who informed him that America had the Bomb. Stalin despised Truman, missed Roosevelt, and thought Churchill the strongest of the capitalists.

  At Teheran, Churchill presented the Sword of Stalingrad to an emotional Stalin, who passed it to Voroshilov, who dropped it. Stalin sent Voroshilov to apologise to Churchill. A blushing Voroshilov grabbed Hugh Lunghi, a young English diplomat, to interpret. Voroshilov apologised, then wished Churchill a happy birthday. The British Prime Minister thought the Marshal was angling for a party invitation.

  At Potsdam, Stalin placed Beria in charge of the race to get the Bomb, the greatest challenge of his career—he could not afford to fail. Here Beria and Molotov visit the sights in the ruins of Hitler’s Berlin, flanked by secret policemen Kruglov (left) and Serov, the expert on deportations.

  Beria and family around 1946. Beria was a rapist and sadist—but a delightful father-in-law and grandfather. His blond, clever and long-suffering wife, Nina (second from left), was the most beautiful of all the grandees’ spouses—Stalin treated her like a daughter. Svetlana Stalin was in love with Beria’s handsome, dashing son Sergo (far left), whom Stalin also liked. But Sergo married Gorky’s lissome granddaughter Martha Peshkova (far right), much to Svetlana’s ire.

  In 1938, when Stalin promoted Beria to NKVD boss and brought him to Moscow, the dictator chose Beria’s house himself. Only Beria was allowed this sumptuous nobleman’s mansion (now the Tunisian Embassy). His wife and son lived in one wing; his own rooms and offices were in another: here many of his female victims were raped. When one refused him and was presented by a guard with the usual bouquet, Beria allegedly snarled: “It’s not a bouquet, it’s a wreath.”

  Just across from the Kremlin, the hideous colossus, the House on the Embankment, with its own cinema, built for the government in the early 1930s, was decimated during the 1937 Terror when many of its inhabitants were shot. In the morning the doorman told the survivors who had been arrested overnight. Here Natalya Rykova saw her father off for the last time. Stalin’s family, such as Pavel and Zhenya Alliluyev, lived here; after the war Svetlana and Vasily had flats here.

  In 1949, death stalked the elegant, pink Granovsky apartment block close to the Kremlin where the younger magnates lived in palatial apartments: Khrushchev and Bulganin on the fifth floor, Malenkov on the fourth. Beria was often seen waiting at the gates in a black limousine for his friends Khrushchev and Malenkov.

  STALIN’S RESIDENCES His main Moscow house, Kuntsevo, from 1932 and the place where he died. Like most of his residences, it was painted a gloomy khaki green.

  His favourite holiday house before the war: Sochi (viewed from outside the security gate), and (inset) inside the courtyard.

  The centre of all his houses was always the vaulted dining room where he enjoyed long Georgian feasts with his henchmen, this one at Sochi. On the left is Stalin’s specially built paddling pool since he did not like swimming.

  STALIN’S FAVOURITE SOUTHERN HOUSES

  Stalin’s post-war holiday headquarters, Coldstream; the millionaire’s mansion in Sukhumi; and Museri.

  Over-promoted, alcoholic, unstable, cruel and terrified, General Vasily Stalin abandoned two wives whom he treated abysmally and tried to win his father’s favour by denouncing air force officers, often with fatal results. Stalin, ashamed of his son’s wartime debauchery and hijinks, demoted him. Vasily feared that after his father’s death Bulganin and Khrushchev would kill him: he preferred the bottle or suicide. Girls flocked to the “Crown Prince.”

  After the war, General Vasily Stalin persuaded General Vlasik to give him his exquisite town house not far from the Kremlin.

  Power and family: the heir apparent Zhdanov. At the end of the war, a tired but cheerful Stalin sits between the two rivals: the flabby, vicious and pusillanimous “clerk,” Malenkov—who was nicknamed “Melanie” for his broad hips—and (right) the smiling, alcoholic Zhdanov. Kaganovich sits on the left. (Back row, left to right): unknown, Vasily Stalin, Svetlana, Poskrebyshev. Stalin pushed Svetlana to marry Zhdanov’s son. But the struggle between Zhdanov and Malenkov ended in a massacre
.

  1945–1953

  After victory, Stalin fell ill with a series of minor strokes or heart attacks. Here, the clearly ailing Generalissimo arrives to rest, accompanied by the porcine Vlasik.

  On 12 August 1945 Generalissimo Stalin cheerfully leads his magnates for the victory parade— Mikoyan, Ukrainian viceroy Khrushchev, Malenkov, Beria in Marshal’s uniform, Molotov (with Vlasik behind him).

  Zhdanov, in Colonel-General’s uniform, was Stalin’s heir apparent and cultural supremo who attacked the arts after the war. Stalin promoted his son Yury and wanted him as his own son-in-law. But the charlatan geneticist Trofim Lysenko (far left) proved the nemesis of the Zhdanovs.

  The exhausted Stalin gloomily leads Beria, Mikoyan and Malenkov through the Kremlin to the Mausoleum for the 1946 May Day parade. In this nest of vipers, they walked arm in arm, but their friendships were masks: each was ready to liquidate the others. Stalin now loathed Beria and mocked Malenkov for being so fat he had lost his human appearance. After Beria tormented the dapper Mikoyan at Stalin’s dinners by hiding tomatoes in his well-cut suits and squashing them, Mikoyan started bringing a spare suit.

  As the struggle for the succession builds up, Stalin leads the mourning at Kalinin’s funeral in 1946. (Front row, from left): Beria, Malenkov, Stalin and Molotov. Behind Molotov (to the right) stands the ill and frail Zhdanov at the height of his power. Zhdanov’s two protégés, Voznesensky and Kuznetsov, are both to the right behind Malenkov’s shoulder. Kaganovich is behind Molotov.