Stalin
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A month after Nadya’s death, Artyom remembers that she was still asking when her mother would be back from abroad. Svetlana was terrified of the dark, which she believed was connected to death. She admitted that she could not love Vasily who was either bullying her, spoiling her fun, or telling her disturbing sexual details that she believed damaged her view of sex.
Vasily, now twelve, was the most damaged: “he suffered a terrible shock,” wrote Svetlana, “ruining him completely.” He became a truculent, name-dropping, violent lout who swore in front of women, expected to be treated as a princeling and yet was tragically inept and unhappy. He ran riot at Zubalovo. No one told Stalin of his outrageous antics. Yet Artyom says Vasily was really “kind, gentle, sweet, uninterested in material things; he could be a bully, but also defended smaller boys.” But he was terrified of Stalin whom he respected like “Christ for the Christians.” In the absence of his disappointed father, Vasily grew up in the sad, emotionally undernourished realm of rough and sycophantic secret policemen instead of loving but firm nannies. Pauker supervised this Soviet Fauntleroy. The Commandant of Zubalovo, Efimov, reported on him to Vlasik who then informed “the Master.”
Stalin trusted his devoted bodyguard, a brawny, hard-living but uncouth peasant, Nikolai Vlasik, thirty-seven, who had joined the Cheka in 1919 and guarded the Politburo, and then exclusively the Vozhd, since 1927. He became a powerful vizier at Stalin’s side but remained the closest thing to Vasily’s father figure: Vasily introduced his girlfriends to Vlasik for his approval.
When his behaviour at school became impossible, it was Pauker who wrote to Vlasik that his “removal to another school is absolutely necessary.” Vasily craved Stalin’s approval: “Hello father!” he wrote in a typical letter in which he talks in a childish version of Bolshevik jargon. “I’m studying at the new school, it’s very good and I think I’m going to become a good Red Vaska! Father, write to me how you are and how is your holiday. Svetlana is well and studies at school too. Greetings from our working collective. Red Vaska.”
But he also wrote letters to the secret policemen: “Hello Comrade Pauker. I’m fine. I don’t fight with Tom [Artyom]. I catch a lot [of fish] and very well. If you’re not busy, come and see us. Comrade Pauker, I ask you to send me a bottle of ink for my pen.” So Pauker, who was so close to Stalin that he shaved him, sent the ink to the child. When it arrived, Vasily thanked “Comrade Pauker,” claimed he had not reduced another boy to tears, and denounced Vlasik for accusing him of it. Already his life among schoolboys and secret policemen was leading the spoilt child to denounce others, a habit that could prove deadly for his victims in later life. The princely tone is unmistakable: “Comrade Efimov has informed you that I asked you to send me a shotgun but I have not received it. Maybe you forgot so please send it. Vasya.”
Stalin was baffled by Vasily’s insubordination and suggested greater discipline. On 12 September 1933, Carolina Til went on holiday, so Stalin, who was in the south, wrote the following instructions to Efimov at Zubalovo: “Nanny will stay at the Moscow home. Make sure that Vasya doesn’t behave outrageously. Don’t give him free playtime and be strict. If Vasya won’t obey Nanny and is offensive, keep him ‘in blinders,’ ” wrote Stalin, adding: “Take Vasya away from Anna Sergeevna [Redens, Nadya’s sister]—she spoils him by harmful and dangerous concessions.” While the father was on holiday, he sent his son a letter and some peaches. “Red Vaska” thanked him. Yet all was not well with Vasily. The pistol that had killed Nadya remained around Stalin’s house. Vasily showed it to Artyom and gave him the leather holster as a keepsake.6
It was only years later that Stalin understood how damaged the children had been by his absence and the care of bodyguards—what he called “the deepest secret in his heart”: “Children growing up without their mother can be raised perfectly by nannies but they can’t replace the mother...” 7
In January 1933, Stalin delivered a swaggering Bolshevik rodomontade to the Plenum: the Five-Year Plan had been a remarkable success. The Party had delivered a tractor industry, electric power, coal, steel and oil production. Cities had been built where none stood before. The Dnieper River dam and power station and the Turk-Sib railway had all been completed (built by Yagoda’s growing slave labour force). Any difficulties were the fault of the enemy opposition. Yet this was Hungry Thirty-Three when millions more starved, hundreds of thousands were deported.
In July 1933, Kirov joined Stalin, Voroshilov, OGPU Deputy Chairman Yagoda and Berman, boss of Gulag, the labour camp system, on the ship Anokhin to celebrate the opening of a gargantuan project of socialist labour: the Baltic–White Sea Canal or, in Bolshevik acronym, the Belomor,59 a 227-kilometre canal begun in December 1931 and completed by the Pharaonic slavery of 170,000 prisoners, of whom around 25,000 died in a year and a half. Voroshilov later praised Kirov and Yagoda for their contributions to this crime.8
By the summer, the magnates were exhausted after five years of Herculean labour in driving the triumphant Five-Year Plan, defeating the opposition and most of all, crushing the peasantry. After bearing such strain, they needed to relax if they were not going to crack—but even if the crisis of Hungry Thirty-Three had been weathered due to the massive repression, this was no time to rest. Sergo, who as People’s Commissar for Heavy Industry directed the Five-Year Plan, suffered heart and circulatory complaints—Stalin himself supervised his treatments.9 Kirov was also breaking under the pressure, suffering from “irregular heartbeat . . . severe irritability and very poor sleep.” The doctors ordered him to rest.10 Kirov’s friend Kuibyshev, Gosplan boss, who had the impossible task of making the planning figures work, was drinking and chasing women: Stalin complained to Molotov, later muttering that he had become “a debauchee.” 11
On 17 August, Stalin and Voroshilov set off in their special train.60 We know from an unpublished note that the Vozhd was already paranoid about his movements, fed up with his sister-in-law Anna Redens and keen for Klim to be more discreet: “Yesterday, around my sister-in-law (a chatter-box) and near the doctors (they gossip), I did not want to say my exact departure. Now I’m informing you that I’ve decided to go tomorrow . . . It’s not good to talk widely. We’re both tasty tidbits and we should not inform everyone by our openness. So if you agree, we go tomorrow at two. So I’ll order Yusis [Stalin’s Lithuanian bodyguard who shared duties with Vlasik] to immediately inform the chief of the railway station and order him to add one wagon, without information as to who it is for. Until tomorrow at two . . .” It was to be a most eventful holiday: there was even an assassination attempt.12
At Krasnaya Polyana, Sochi, Stalin found Lakoba, the Abkhazian chief, waiting on the veranda along with President Kalinin and Poskrebyshev. When Stalin and Lakoba strolled in the gardens, Beria, now effective viceroy of the Caucasus, joined them. Lakoba and Beria, already enemies, had come separately. After breakfast on the veranda, the Vozhd, followed by this swelling entourage, which was soon joined by Yan Rudzutak, a Latvian Old Bolshevik who headed the Control Commission but was increasingly distrusted by Stalin, toured his gardens.
“Stop being idle,” said the green-fingered Stalin. “The wild bushes here need to be weeded.” The grandees and the guards set to work, collecting wood and cutting brambles while Stalin, in his white tunic with baggy white trousers tucked into boots, supervised, puffing on his pipe. Taking a fork, he even did some weeding himself. Beria worked with a rake while one of the leaders from Moscow hacked with an axe. Beria seized the axe and, chopping away to impress Stalin, joked, with rather obvious double entendre: “I’m just demonstrating to the master of the garden, Joseph Vissarionovich, that I can chop down any tree.” No grandee was too big for Beria to fell. He would soon get the chance to wield his little axe.
Stalin sat down on his wicker chair and Beria perched behind him like a medieval courtier with the axe in his belt. Svetlana, who now called Beria “Uncle Lara,” was brought down to join them. When Stalin did some work on his papers, Lakoba listened to musi
c on headphones while Beria called over to Svetlana, sat her on his knee and was photographed in a famous picture with his pince-nez glistening in the sun and his hands on the child, while the Master worked patiently in the background.
Voroshilov and Budyonny, who had also turned up, took Stalin, in the front seat of an open Packard, to inspect their horses bred by the army stud. They went on a cruise and then they went hunting, Stalin cheerfully carrying his rifle over his shoulder, with his hat on the back of his head, as his Chekist guard wiped the sweat off his forehead. After a day’s hunting, they pitched tents for an al fresco picnic and barbecue. Later, Stalin went fishing. The informality of the whole trip is obvious: it was one of the last times he lived like this.13
Meanwhile Stalin was outraged when, in his absence, Sergo managed to manipulate the Politburo against him. Kaganovich remained in charge as more and more leaders went on their holidays. He wrote to Stalin virtually every day, ending always with the same request: “Please inform us of your opinion.” The magnates were constantly fighting one another for resources: the tougher the struggle for collectivization, the faster the tempo of industrialization, the more accidents and mistakes made in the factories, the greater the struggle within the Politburo for control over their own fiefdoms. “Iron-Arse” Molotov, the Premier, rowed with Ordzhonikidze, the quick-tempered Heavy Industry Commissar, and Kaganovich who fought with Kirov who clashed with Voroshilov and so on. But suddenly, the Politburo united against Stalin’s own wishes.14
In the summer of 1933, Molotov received a report that a factory in Zaporozhe was producing defective combine harvester parts due to sabotage. Molotov, who agreed with Stalin that since their system was perfect and their ideology scientifically correct, all industrial mistakes must be the result of sabotage by wreckers, ordered Procurator-General Akulov to arrest the guilty. The local leaders appealed to Sergo. When the case came before the Supreme Court, the government was represented by the Deputy Procurator, an ex-Menshevik lawyer, Andrei Vyshinsky, who would be one of Stalin’s most notorious grandees in the coming Terror. But with Stalin on holiday, Sergo passionately defended his industrial officials and persuaded the Politburo, including Molotov and Kaganovich, to condemn Vyshinsky’s summing-up.
On 29 August, Stalin discovered Sergo’s mischief and fired off a telegram of Pharisaical rage: “I consider the position adopted by the Politburo incorrect and dangerous . . . I find it lamentable that Kaganovich and Molotov were not capable of resisting bureaucratic pressure from the People’s Commissariat of Heavy Industry.” Two days later, Kaganovich, Andreyev, Kuibyshev and Mikoyan officially annulled their resolution.
Stalin brooded about the danger of Sergo’s ability to use his undoubted prestige and force of personality to sway his potentates, letting off steam to Molotov: “I consider Sergo’s actions the behaviour of a hooligan. How can you have let him have his way?” Stalin was flabbergasted that Molotov and Kaganovich could have fallen for it. “What’s the matter? Did Kaganovich pull a fast one? . . . And he’s not the only one.” He fired off reprimands: “I’ve written to Kaganovich to express to him my astonishment that he found himself, in this case, in the camp of reactionary elements.”
Two weeks later, on 12 September, he was still ranting to Molotov that Sergo was showing anti-Party tendencies in defending “reactionary elements of the Party against the Central Committee.” He punished Molotov by calling him back from his holiday in the Crimea—“neither I nor Voroshilov like the fact that you’re vacationing for six weeks instead of two weeks”—and then felt guilty about it: “I am a little uncomfortable with being the reason for your early return,” he apologized but then showed his continuing anger with Kaganovich and Kuibyshev: “It’s obvious it would be rash to leave the centre’s work to Kaganovich alone (Kuibyshev may start drinking).”15 Molotov miserably returned to Moscow. 16
Stalin easily defeated Sergo but the vehemence of his attack on the “hooligan” shows how seriously he took the strongest leader after himself. Moody and excitable, yet the very personification of the tough Stalinist administrator, Sergo Ordzhonikidze was born in 1886, the son of Georgian nobility. Orphaned when he was ten, he was barely educated but trained incongruously as a nurse.61 He had already joined the Party at seventeen and was arrested at least four times before joining Lenin in Paris in 1911, one of the few Stalinists to experience emigration (briefly). A member of the Central Committee since 1912 (like Stalin), he was personally responsible in 1921 for brutally annexing and Bolshevizing Georgia and Azerbaijan where he was known as “Stalin’s Arse.” Lenin attacked him for slapping a comrade and for indulging in drunken orgies with hussies but also defended him for his aggressive shouting by joking, “He does shout . . . but he’s deaf in one ear.”
In the Civil War, Sergo had been a dashing, leonine hero, at home on horseback (he was accused of riding a white horse through conquered Tiflis), so “young and strong,” it “seemed as if he had been born in his long military coat and boots.” He was explosively temperamental. In the early twenties, he actually punched Molotov in a row over Zinoviev’s book Leninism, an incident that demonstrates how seriously they took matters of ideology: Kirov had separated them. Sergo’s daughter, Eteri, recalls that this volcanic Georgian often got so heated that he slapped his comrades but the eruption soon passed—“he would give his life for one he loved and shoot the one he hated,” said his wife Zina.
Promoted to run the Control Commission in 1926, Sergo was Stalin’s most aggressive ally in the fight against the oppositions until he was placed in charge of Heavy Industry. He did not understand the subtleties of economics but he employed experts who did, driving them by charm and force. “You terrorize comrades at work,” complained one of his subordinates who were constantly appealing against his tempers. “Sergo really slapped them!” wrote Stalin approvingly to Voroshilov in 1928. “The opposition were scared!”
Sergo, who had flirted with, then betrayed Bukharin, was a forceful supporter of Stalin’s Great Turn—“he accepted the policy heart and soul,” said Kaganovich. Beloved by friends from Kaganovich to Bukharin and Kirov, Sergo was “the perfect Bolshevik,” thought Maria Svanidze, and “chivalrous” too, according to Khrushchev. “His kind eyes, grey hair and big moustache,” wrote Beria’s son, “gave him the look of an old Georgian prince.” Owing his career to Stalin, he remained the last big beast of the Politburo, sceptical about Stalin’s cult, with his own clientele in industry and the Caucasus whom he was capable of defending. He was certainly never afraid to disagree with Stalin62 whom he treated like a prickly elder brother: sometimes he even gave him quasi-orders.
In September 1933, Sergo was holidaying in Kislovodsk, his favourite resort, whence he was soon in brisk correspondence with Stalin who resented this big-hearted “prince.” Sergo was, Stalin complained, “vain to the point of folly.”17
“Here on vacation,” Stalin wrote, “I do not sit in one place but move from one location to another . . .” After a month, Stalin moved southwards to his newly built house at Museri. Set atop a hill in a semi-tropical park, it was an ugly grey two-storey residence with his beloved wood panelling, expansive verandas, large dining room and a beautiful view down to a harbour where Lakoba had constructed a special jetty. It was surrounded by walks along serpentine paths that led to a round summerhouse, where Stalin worked, and down steps to the sea. Often Lakoba and Stalin strolled down to a nearby village where the locals laid on al fresco Abkhazian feasts.
On 23 September, Lakoba arranged a boating and shooting trip: Stalin and Vlasik motored along the coast from the specially built jetty on a motor yacht, Red Star, with their guns on their knees. Suddenly there was a burst of machine-gun fire from the coast.
10
Spoiled Victory: Kirov, the Plot and the Seventeenth Congress
Vlasik threw himself onto Stalin on the deck of the Red Star, requesting permission to return fire. Firing shots landwards, the boat turned to the open sea. Stalin initially thought it had just been Georgians
firing a greeting but he changed his mind. He received a letter from the border guards admitting they had fired, mistaking it for a foreign vessel. Beria investigated personally, displaying his ruthlessness to get results which impressed Stalin. Yet he aroused suspicions that he had contrived the attack to undermine Lakoba, who was responsible for security inside Abkhazia. The guards were despatched to Siberia. Vlasik and Beria became closer to Stalin.1
Back on dry land, the entourage progressed into Gagra, where the GPU had found a new dacha in the hills which Lakoba had started to rebuild. This became a favourite residence, Kholodnaya Rechka, Coldstream, a Stalinist eyrie built on a cliff with views of dazzling natural beauty.63 Returning to Sochi, Svetlana stayed with Stalin but when she went back to school, he found himself “like a lonely owl” and craved Yenukidze’s company.2 “What keeps you in Moscow?” he wrote to Abel. “Come to Sochi, swim in the sea and let your heart rest. Tell Kalinin from me that he commits a crime if he doesn’t send you on holiday immediately . . . You could live with me at the dacha . . . I’ve visited the new dacha at Gagra today . . . Voroshilov and his wife are enchanted with it . . . Your Koba.”3
After this long holiday, the “lonely owl” returned to Moscow, on 4 November 1933, to plan the coming Congress of Victors which was to crown him for the triumphs of the last four years. Moscow felt as if it was waking up and stretching after a long nightmare. The famine was over. The harvest had improved. The starving millions were buried and forgotten in villages that had disappeared forever off the map.
There was much to celebrate as the delegates started to arrive for the Seventeenth Congress in late January. It must have been an exciting and proud time for the 1,966 voting delegates to be visiting Moscow from every corner of the sprawling workers’ paradise. The Congress was the highest Party organ, which theoretically elected the Central Committee to govern in its place until it met again, usually four years later. But by 1934, this was a pantomime of triumphalism, supervised by Stalin and Kaganovich, minutely choreographed by Poskrebyshev.