Young Stalin

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  * Trotsky later claimed that Stalin amassed power as a bureaucratic mediocrity, but it was actually Yakov Sverdlov, assisted by Elena Stasova, who ran the Party machine. Stalin was not a born bureaucrat at all. He was a hard worker utterly dedicated to politics; indeed everything with Stalin was political, but he worked in an eccentric, structureless, unbureaucratic, almost bohemian, style that would not have succeeded in any other government, then or now. Lenin’s trust was won in the bank robberies and intrigues of the early years and, later, on the battlefields of the Civil War: Stalin was hardly in his office before 1920.

  * Alexandra Kollontai always treated Stalin with old-world courtesy: she served as his Swedish Ambassador and died naturally. Dybenko was shot in the Great Terror.

  Epilogue

  Old Ninika

  Our Ninika has grown old

  His hero’s shoulders have failed him . . .

  How did this desolate grey hair

  Break an iron strength?

  Oh mother! Many a time

  With his “hyena” sickle swinging,

  Bare-chested, at the end of the cornfield

  He must have suddenly burst out with a roar.

  He must have piled up mountains

  Of sheaves side by side,

  And on his face governed by dripping sweat

  Fire and smoke must have poured out.

  But now he can longer move his knees,

  Scythed down by old age.

  He lies down or he dreams or he tells

  His children’s children of the past.

  From time to time he catches the sound

  Of singing in the nearby cornfields

  And his heart that was once so tough

  Begins to beat with pleasure.

  He drags himself out, trembling.

  He takes a few steps on his shepherd’s crook

  And, when he catches sight of the lads,

  He smiles with relief.

  —SOSELO (Josef Stalin)

  An Old Tyrant—in Remembrance

  of Things Past

  On the lush hills above Gagra on the Black Sea coast, an old Georgian man, small, squat, paunchy, with thinning grey hair and a moustache, wearing a grey tunic and baggy trousers, sat on the verandah of a clifftop mansion, a fortified eyrie, with panoramic views, and talked to his elderly guests about how they grew up together . . .

  The mtsvadi kebabs and spicy vegetable dishes of a Georgian supra were spread around the table with bottles of local red wine as the men talked in Georgian about their boyhoods in Gori and Tiflis, their seminary studies and their youthful radicalism. It did not matter that they had parted and followed their different paths, because the host “had never forgotten his schoolmates and fellow seminarists.”

  In the years before his death, Generalissimo Stalin, Premier of the Soviet government and General Secretary of the Communist Party, conqueror of Berlin and supreme pontiff of world Marxism, the old Soso, exhausted by more than fifty years of conspiracy, thirty years of government, four years of total war, would retire for many months to his favourite seaside villa on the semi-tropical Black Sea of his homeland, to spend the days gardening, conspiring and reading—and the warm evenings talking in remembrance of things past.

  Sometimes he talked to his magnates Molotov or Voroshilov, sometimes to his younger Georgian viceroys and protégés, but often “Stalin invited Georgian houseguests whom he’d known in his youth. When he had time,” recalls Candide Charkviani, First Secretary of the Georgian Party, whose name reminded Stalin of his patron, Father Kote Charkviani of Gori, “he kept in touch with his schoolmates. Stalin used to tell stories of his childhood and then remember his friends and decide he wanted to see them. So it was arranged to invite them to the house in Gagra.” Stalin enjoyed planning this dinner-party: “Let’s invite Peter Kapanadze and Vaso Egnatashvili . . . I wonder how Tseradze is? He was a famous wrestler . . . It would be good to get him along and . . .”

  Whereupon Kapanadze, Egnatashvili and the other old men were gathered and driven from Tiflis to the Black Sea up into the hills, along the precipitous drive, through the steel gates and the drive-through guardhouse, to Stalin’s secret and heavily guarded mansion, Coldstream.

  There, the guards brought them to Stalin, who was often clipping roses or weeding around his lemon-trees, reading on the verandah, writing in the wooden summerhouse that was balanced on the edge of the cliff or playing billiards. Dinner would be laid by almost invisible ladies in aprons who then disappeared. Stalin opened the Georgian wine. Everyone helped themselves to food, set out as a buffet.

  “The guests had a good time,” says Charkviani. Stalin was friendly and nostalgic—but there were also flashes of dictatorial fury. “During the dinner, there was an unpleasant moment when Stalin noticed a pack of Georgian cigarettes with an illustration of a saucily posed girl.” Abruptly, he lost his temper: “When have you ever seen a decent woman in such a pose? This is unacceptable!”

  Charkviani and the other apparatchiks promised to redesign the cigarettes. Stalin calmed down. Mostly, Soso and the old friends “talked about theatre, art, literature and partially about politics.” He poignantly remembered his two wives, Kato and Nadya; he talked about the problems of his children—and Peter Kapanadze walked solemnly round the table to whisper his condolences for the death of Stalin’s son Yakov. Stalin nodded sadly: “Many families lost sons.” Then he recounted his father’s drinking, the Gori wrestling bouts, his adventures in 1905, the antics of Kamo, Tsintsadze and his bank robbers, and his increasingly Herculean exploits in exile. But always the fearsome shadow of the Terror, the shameful human cost of the Revolution and the wicked price of Stalin’s lust for power hung over them all.

  “Stalin recalled the lives of other Old Bolsheviks and told anecdotes about them.” He mentioned names that made the guests shiver slightly, for they were people whom Stalin himself had wantonly murdered. Sometimes he mused that they had been wrongly executed—on his orders. “I was surprised,” says Charkviani, “that when he mentioned people who were unjustly liquidated, he talked with the calm detachment of a historian, showing neither sorrow nor rage—but speaking without rancour, with just a tone of light humour . . .” The only time Stalin explained this sentiment was, much earlier, in a letter to his mother: “You know the saying: ‘While I live, I’ll enjoy my violets, when I die the graveyard worms can rejoice.’”

  Looking back into his secret past, the old dictator reflected: “Historians are the sort of people who’ll discover not only facts that are buried underground but even those at the very bottom of the ocean—and reveal them to the world.” He asked, almost to himself: “Can you keep a secret?”

  Stalin casually looked through a glass darkly as he remembered the lives of his family, friends and acquaintances whose mixed destinies form a microcosm of the colossal tragedy of his reign.1

  Stalin “was a bad and neglectful son, as he was father and husband,” writes his daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva Stalin. “He devoted his whole being to something else, to politics and struggle. And so people who weren’t personally close were always more important to him than those who were.” But, worse, he permitted, indeed encouraged, his politics to destroy and consume his loved ones.

  By 1918, most of the Alliluyev children were working for Soso. When Stalin was sent down to Tsaritsyn (Stalingrad) in 1918 during the Civil War, he took his girlfriend Nadya Alliluyeva and her brother Fyodor on his armoured train as his assistants. When they returned, Nadya was effectively his wife, moving into his apartment in the Kremlin and blessing him with two children, a son, Vasily,* and a daughter, Svetlana. After the Civil War, Nadya worked for a while as one of Lenin’s secretaries.

  Anna Alliluyeva also got married during the Civil War. She accompanied Stalin and Dzerzhinsky on their mission to investigate the fall of Perm, where she fell in love with Dzerzhinsky’s Polish assistant, Stanislas Redens, who became a senior secret policeman and a member of Stalin’s court. Their brother Pavel ser
ved as a diplomat and military commissar in the Defence Commissariat. All flourished in Stalin’s entourage. Yet Stalin’s effect on the family was nothing short of apocalyptic.

  The first tragedy was that of the clever but fragile Fyodor. During the Civil War, he was recruited into special forces being trained by Kamo. The psychotic former bank robber was obsessed with tests of loyalty under fire. To this end, he devised a plan to simulate his unit’s capture by enemy Whites. “At night he would seize the comrades and lead them out to be shot. If any began to beg for mercy and turn traitor, he would shoot them . . . ‘That way,’ said Kamo, ‘you could be absolutely sure they wouldn’t let you down.’” One revealed himself—and was shot on the spot. Then came the ultimate test: he cut open the chest and tore out the heart. “Here,” he told Fyodor, “is the heart of your officer!”

  Fyodor lost his mind. “He sat in silence for a number of years in hospital,” said his niece Svetlana. “Slowly speech came back and he became a human being again.” He never worked, but he outlived Stalin.

  The marriage to Nadya was at first quite happy. Members of the Alliluyev family moved into Stalin’s apartment and his country house, Zubalovo, ironically the former home of a Baku oil baron. Nadya seemed content to be a housewife and mother but soon craved a serious career. The pressure of Stalin’s personality, the political stress of the war on the peasantry, the strain of raising two children and studying for a degree, as well as her manic jealousy of his habitual flirting, broke Nadya. Suffering from depression, she committed suicide in November 1932.

  Stalin’s parents-in-law, Sergei and Olga, lived on in the Kremlin and the dacha even as he decimated their family. After Nadya’s death, a heartbroken Stalin became close to Zhenya Alliluyeva, the wife of Pavel, and this may have led to an affair. If so, it was over by the time Stalin unleashed the Great Terror.

  Stanislas Redens was arrested and shot despite the pleas of his wife, Anna. Pavel Alliluyev died in suspicious circumstances. After the Second World War, Stalin’s sisters-in-law Anna and Zhenya irritated him by interfering in family and political matters, and becoming too close to various Jews under investigation. With Stalin’s permission, Anna wrote her memoirs, but they turned out to be characteristically tactless, especially about his stiff arm. He ordered the arrest of the two women. When they were released on his death, both were convinced that Stalin had freed them, refusing to believe that he himself had been responsible for their misery. Anna lost her mind in jail, but she lived until 1964.2

  · · ·

  Stalin’s other family, the Svanidzes, were just as unfortunate. His son Yakov did not see his father again until 1921 when his uncle, Alyosha Svanidze, and Kamo’s sister brought him to Moscow. He moved into Stalin’s and Nadya’s household, but his slow Georgian ways infuriated his father. When Yakov bungled a suicide, more of a cry for help, Stalin laughed that “he could not even shoot straight.”

  Alyosha Svanidze, who married a beautiful Jewish soprano, remained an intimate friend. He and Soso were “like brothers.” He served abroad, then returned in the early 1930s as Deputy Chairman of the Soviet State Bank. After Nadya’s suicide, the Svanidzes, including Kato’s sisters, became even closer to Stalin: Mariko worked in Moscow as Abel Yenukidze’s secretary, while Sashiko Svanidze Monoselidze frequently stayed with Stalin.

  Alyosha’s wife, Maria, and his sister Sashiko competed with the Alliluyev women, Anna and Zhenya, to care for Stalin. In the early 1930s, they virtually lived with him, but their competition irked the dictator.

  In 1935, Sashiko’s husband, Monoselidze, asked Stalin for financial help, and he replied:

  I’ve given 5,000 roubles to Sasha [Sashiko]. For the moment this will be enough for both of you. I have no more money or I’d send it. These are royalties I get for my speeches and articles . . . But this should remain between ourselves (you, me and Sasha). No one else should get to know about it, otherwise my other relatives and acquaintances will begin to pursue me and will never leave me alone. So this is how it must be.

  Misha! Live happily a thousand years! Give my greetings to our friends!

  Yours

  Soso

  19 February 1935

  P.S. If you meet my mother, give her my greetings

  Sashiko died of cancer in 1936, but her sister Mariko was arrested in the case against her boss, Yenukidze. The next year, Stalin ordered the arrest of Alyosha Svanidze and his wife. He told the NKVD to demand that Alyosha confess to being a German spy in return for his life. Alyosha refused defiantly. “Such aristocratic pride,” said Stalin. Alyosha, his wife, Maria, and his sister Mariko were executed in 1941 as the Germans advanced. During the Terror, Stalin liked to excuse the arrest of other leading families: “What can I do? My own family is in jail!”

  Stalin’s son Yakov, by Kato Svanidze, married during the 1930s and had a daughter, Galina, who is still alive. During the German invasion, he was captured by the Nazis. His father believed he had betrayed him and had his wife arrested. But Yakov committed suicide without breaking. Afterwards, Stalin regretfully admitted the boy had been “a real man.”3

  As for the women in his life, their fates are often mysterious, but they received little favour when their lover became the Soviet leader.

  “Glamourpuss,” the schoolgirl Pelageya Onufrieva, became a teacher, but in 1917 left her profession and married a mechanic named Fomin. Her father and brothers were targeted as kulaks during Stalin’s war on the peasantry in the early 1930s, and were exiled to Siberia. In 1937, her husband was arrested and held as a potential saboteur. As a result her son lost a scholarship to study at Leningrad University, whereupon she wrote to Stalin. The scholarship was restored. However, her husband was again arrested in 1947 and sentenced to ten years in prison as an Enemy of the People.

  When she was interviewed in 1944 about the Leader, a secret policeman demanded the postcards and book given by Stalin. “But my life has been hard and nomadic,” she retorted, “I had a big family and I couldn’t keep everything, but I kept the book. So it’s a shame to give it to you because it’s my only memory, not so much of Stalin but of the man named Josef. That’s what I called him. I would say we were friends. The book’s precious to me and you can take it when I’m dead.” The apparatchik confiscated the book.

  Ludmilla Stal worked for many years in the Central Committee, was decorated and helped edit Stalin’s works, dying before the Second World War. Tatiana Slavatinskaya prospered in the CC Secret Department, becoming a member of the Central Control Commission. But in 1937 her son-in-law, a general, was shot, her daughter and son arrested and exiled for eight years. She and her grandchildren were expelled from the House on the Embankment, where many of the elite lived. One grandson, Yury Trifonov, the writer, chronicled the experience in his novella House on the Embankment.

  As far as we know, Stalin met up with only one of his girlfriends.* “In 1925,” recalls his companion in Solvychegodsk, Tatiana Sukhova, “I moved to Moscow and wanted to see Comrade Stalin very much. I wrote to him. I was very surprised to hear his voice on the phone that very evening.” Next day they met at his office on Old Square: “We talked about my work, our mutual friends and Solvychegodsk.”

  In 1929, when Stalin was taking the waters in Matsesta, in the south, Sukhova, a teacher, contacted him again. “Three young men in white suits came and collected me” and took her to his villa, where she was welcomed by Nadya Alliluyeva and Stalin. They reminisced over supper. Nadya asked her about young Stalin in exile: “I described his appearance and said that Comrade Stalin was never parted from his white hood.” Nadya laughed, “saying she never imagined he was such a dandy!” Then Stalin proudly showed her his tomatoes in his vegetable garden and took her to a firing-range beside the house, where he hit a bull’s-eye with a rifle. He let her fire a “small English Montecristo” pistol—but she missed. “How will you defend yourself?” Stalin asked her. When she told him that she was badly treated at her resthouse, he muttered, “They must be reprimanded.”
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br />   But the next year Sukhova was implicated in Stalin’s trial of Ramzin and others. She appealed to him and he received her. “Is this the first time you’ve got into a scrape?” he asked, adding, “I’m always getting into trouble myself.” He then phoned her institute and protected her. “Henceforth you must fight for yourself.” They never met again.4

  Stalin left at least two illegitimate children in his wake. Neither received any direct help from their father.

  Constantine Kuzakov, the son of Stalin’s Solvychegodsk landlady, Maria, had the most interesting career of the two. When Kuzakova saw Stalin’s appointment to the government in 1917, she wrote to him asking for help. When she received no reply, she approached Lenin’s office, where Stalin’s, wife Nadya, still worked. Without telling Stalin, she increased Kuzakova’s benefits payments, but she informed the father afterwards.

  Stalin must have helped get the boy into Leningrad University. In 1932, the NKVD made him sign a statement promising never to discuss his “origin.”

  He taught philosophy at the Leningrad Military Mechanical Institute, and was promoted to work in the CC apparat in Moscow by Andrei Zhdanov, the magnate closest to Stalin. Constantine later said that Zhdanov knew his “origin.” He never met his father, though “once Stalin stopped and looked at me and I felt he wanted to tell me something. I wanted to rush to him, but something stopped me. He waved his pipe and moved on.” During the Second World War, Constantine was a decorated colonel, but his mother died of starvation in the Siege of Leningrad.