Stalin

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  Three days later, Stalin informed Kaganovich that “Svetlana the Mistress . . . demands decisions . . . in order to check on her Secretaries.”

  “Hail Mistress Svetlana!” replied Kaganovich. “We await her impatiently.” When she was back in Moscow, she visited Kaganovich who reported to her father: “Today our Mistress Svetlana inspected our work...” Indeed, Stalin encouraged her interest in politics: “Your little Secretaries received your letter and we discussed its contents to our great satisfaction. Your letter enabled us to find our way in complicated international and domestic political questions. Write to us often.” Soon she was commanding Stalin in her “Daily Order No. 3. I order you to show me what happens in the Central Committee! Strictly confidential. Stalina, the Mistress of the house.”12

  Then Stalin heard from Beria that his mother Keke was getting frailer. On 17 October, he headed across to Tiflis to visit her for only the third time since the Revolution.

  Beria had taken over the responsibility for caring for the old lady like a courtier looking after a dowager empress. She had lived for years in comfortable rooms in the servant’s quarters of the palace of the nineteenth-century Tsarist governor, Prince Michael Vorontsov, where she was accompanied by two old ladies. All of them wore the traditional black headdress and long dress of Georgian widows. Beria and his wife Nina called on Keke frequently, recalling her spicy taste for sexual gossip:

  “Why don’t you take a lover?” she asked Nina. Stalin was a negligent son but still wrote his dutiful notes: “Dear Mother, please live for 10,000 years. Kisses, Soso.” He apologized, “I know you’re disappointed in me but what can I do? I’m busy and can’t write often.”

  Mother sent sweets; Soso, money; but, as the son who had replaced her husband as the man of the family, he always played the hero, revealing his dreams of destiny and courage: “Hello my mama, the children thank you for the sweets. I’m healthy, don’t worry about me . . . I’ll stand up for my destiny! You need more money? I sent you 500 roubles and photos of me and the children. PS the children bow to you. After Nadya’s death, my private life is very hard but a strong man must always be valiant.” 13

  Stalin took special trouble to protect the Egnatashvili brothers, the children of the innkeeper who was the benefactor of his mother. Alexander Egnatashvili, a Chekist officer in Moscow (supposedly Stalin’s food taster, nicknamed “the Rabbit”), kept this old link alive: “My dear spiritual mother,” Egnatashvili wrote in April 1934, “yesterday I visited Soso and we talked a long time . . . he’s put on weight . . . In the last four years, I had not seen him so healthy . . . He was joking a lot. Who says he’s older? No one thinks he’s more than 47!” But she was ailing.

  “I know you’re ill,” Stalin wrote to her. “Be strong. I’m sending you my children . . .” Vasily and Svetlana stayed at Beria’s residences and then visited the old lady in her “tiny room,” filled with portraits of her son. Svetlana remembered how Nina Beria chatted to her in Georgian but the old lady could not speak Russian.

  Now Stalin recruited his old brother-in-law Alyosha Svanidze and Lakoba to visit his mother with him while Beria briskly made the arrangements. He did not stay long. If he had looked around the rooms, he would have noticed that not only did she have photographs of Stalin but she also had a portrait of Beria in her bedroom. Beria had his own cult of personality in Georgia but more than that, he must have become like a son to her.

  Stalin’s real feelings for his mother were complicated by her taste for beating him and alleged affairs with her employers. There is a clue to this possible saint-whore complex in his library where he underlined a passage in Tolstoy’s Resurrection about how a mother is both kind and wicked. But she also had the tendency of making tactless, if drily witty, comments. She wondered why Stalin fell out with Trotsky: they should have ruled together. Now when Stalin sat smiling beside her, he revealingly asked her: “Why did you beat me so hard?”

  “That’s why you turned out so well,” she replied, before asking: “Joseph, what exactly are you now?”

  “Well, remember the Tsar? I’m something like a Tsar.”

  “You’d have done better to become a priest,” she said, a comment that delighted Stalin.

  The newspapers reported the visit with the queasy sentimentality of a Bolshevik version of Hello! magazine: “Seventy-five-year-old Keke is kind and lively,” gushed Pravda. “She seems to light up when she talks about the unforgettable moments of their meeting. ‘The whole world rejoices when it looks upon my son and our country. What would you expect me, his mother, to feel?’ ”

  Stalin was irritated by this outbreak of Stalinist Hello!-ism. When Poskrebyshev sent him the article, Stalin wrote back: “It’s nothing to do with me.” But then he penned another Blimpish note to Molotov and Kaganovich: “I demand we ban petit bourgeois tidbits that have infiltrated our press . . . to insert the interview with my mother and all this other balderdash. I ask to be freed of the incessant publicity din of these bastards!” But he was glad his mother was healthy, telling her, “Our clan is evidently very strong” and sending some presents: a headdress, a jacket and some medicine.14

  Back in Moscow,88 Stalin decided to reopen and expand the Kirov Case that had subsided with the shooting of Nikolaev and sentencing of Zinoviev and Kamenev in early 1935. Now the two Old Bolsheviks were reinterrogated and the net of arrests was spread wider. Then a former associate of Trotsky’s named Valentin Olberg was arrested by the NKVD in Gorky. His interrogation “established” that Trotsky was also involved in the murder of Kirov. More arrests followed.15

  16

  Take Your Partners; Mount Your Prisoners: The Show Trial

  Oblivious of these lengthening shadows, Stalin’s birthday party, attended by the magnates, Beria and the family, was “noisy and cheerful.” Voroshilov was resplendent in his new white Marshal’s uniform while his dowdy wife stared jealously at Maria Svanidze’s dress from Berlin. After dinner, there were songs and dancing like old times: with Zhdanov on harmonies, they sang Abkhazian, Ukrainian, student and comic songs. Stalin decided to order a piano so Zhdanov could play. Amid general hilarity, Postyshev, one of the Ukrainian bosses, slow-danced with Molotov—and “this couple very much amused Joseph and all the guests.” Here was the first example of the notorious stag slow dancing that was to become more forced after the war.

  Stalin took over the gramophone and even did some Russian dancing. Mikoyan performed his leaping lezginka. The Svanidzes did the foxtrot and asked Stalin to join them but he said he had given up dancing since Nadya’s death. They danced until four.1

  In the spring of 1936, the arrests of old Trotskyites spread further and those already in camps were resentenced. Those convicted of “terror” offences were to be shot. But the real work was the creation of a new sort of political show: the first of Stalin’s great trials. Yezhov was the supervisor of this case—this hopeful theoretician was even writing a book about the Zinovievites, corrected personally by Stalin.2 Yagoda, Commissar-General of State Security, who was sceptical about this “nonsense,” remained in charge but Yezhov constantly undermined him. This process exhausted frail Yezhov. Soon he was once again so debilitated that Kaganovich suggested, and Stalin approved, that he be sent on another special holiday for two months with a further 3,000 roubles.3

  The chief defendants were to be Zinoviev and Kamenev. Their old friends were arrested to help persuade them to perform. Stalin followed every detail of the interrogations. The NKVD interrogators were to devote themselves body and soul to achieving the confessions. Stalin’s instructions to the NKVD were suggestive of this terrible process: “Mount your prisoner and do not dismount until they have confessed.”

  The NKVD defector Alexander Orlov left the best account of how Yezhov rigged up this trial, promising the “witnesses” their lives in return for testifying against Zinoviev and Kamenev who refused to cooperate. Stalin’s office phoned hourly for news.

  “You think Kamenev may not confess?” Stalin asked Mirono
v, one of Yagoda’s Chekists.

  “I don’t know,” replied Mironov.

  “You don’t know?” said Stalin. “Do you know how much our State weighs with all the factories, machines, the army with all the armaments and the navy?” Mironov thought he was joking but Stalin was not smiling. “Think it over and tell me?” Stalin kept staring at him.

  “Nobody can know that, Joseph Vissarionovich; it is the realm of astronomical figures.”

  “Well, and can one man withstand the pressure of that astronomical weight?”

  “No,” replied Mironov.

  “Well then . . . Don’t come to report to me until you have in this briefcase the confession of Kamenev.” Even though they were not physically tortured, the regime of threats and sleeplessness demoralized Zinoviev, suffering from asthma, and Kamenev. The heating was turned up in their cells in midsummer. Yezhov threatened that Kamenev’s son would be shot. 4

  While the interrogators worked on Zinoviev and Kamenev, Maxim Gorky was dying of influenza and bronchial pneumonia. The old writer was now thoroughly disillusioned. The dangers of his Chekist companions became obvious when Gorky’s son Maxim died mysteriously of influenza. Later, Yagoda would be accused, with the family doctors, of killing him. After his death, Maxim’s daughter Martha remembers how Yagoda would visit the Gorky household every morning for a cup of coffee and a flirtation with her mother, on his way to the Lubianka: “he was in love with Timosha and wanted her to return his affection,” said Alexei Tolstoy’s wife.

  “You still don’t know me, I can do anything,” he threatened the distraught Timosha: the writer Alexander Tikhonov claimed they began an affair; her daughter denies it. When Stalin visited, Yagoda lingered, still in love with Timosha and increasingly worried about himself. After the Politburo had left, he asked Gorky’s secretary: “Did they come? They’ve left now? What did they talk about? . . . Did they say anything about us . . .?” 5

  Stalin had asked Gorky to write his biography, but the novelist recoiled from the task. Instead he bombarded Stalin and the Politburo with crazy proposals such as a project to commission Socialist Realist writers to “rewrite the world’s books anew.” Stalin’s apologies for late replies became ever more extreme: “I’m as lazy as a pig on things marked ‘correspondence,’ ” confessed Stalin to Gorky. “How do you feel? Healthy? How’s your work? Me and my friends are fine.” The NKVD actually printed false issues of Pravda especially for Gorky, to conceal the persecution of his friend, Kamenev.89 Gorky himself realized that he was now under house arrest: “I’m surrounded,” he muttered, “trapped.”

  In the first week of June, Gorky slept much of the days as his condition worsened. He was supervised by the best doctors but he was failing.

  “Let them come if they can get here in time,” said Gorky. Stalin, Molotov and Voroshilov were pleased to see that he had recovered—after a camphor injection. Stalin took control of the sickroom: “Why are there so many people here?” he asked. “Who’s that sitting beside Alexei Maximovich dressed in black? A nun, is she? All she lacks is a candle in her hands.” This was Baroness Moura Budberg, the mistress Gorky shared with H. G. Wells. “Get them all out of here except for that woman, the one in white, who’s looking after him . . . Why’s there such a funereal mood here? A healthy person might die in such an atmosphere.” Stalin stopped Gorky discussing literature but called for wine and they toasted him and then embraced.

  Days later, Stalin arrived only to be told that Gorky was too ill to see him: “Alexei Mikhailovich, we visited you at two in the morning,” he wrote. “Your pulse was they say 82. The doctors did not allow us to come in to you. We submitted. Hello from all of us, a big hello. Stalin.” Molotov and Voroshilov signed underneath.

  Gorky started to spit blood and died on 18 June, of TB, pneumonia and heart failure. Later it was claimed that his doctors and Yagoda had murdered him deliberately: they certainly confessed to his murder. His death was convenient before Zinoviev’s trial but his medical records in the NKVD archives suggest that he died naturally.6

  Yagoda was skulking in the dining room at Gorky’s house but Stalin had already turned against him. “And what’s that creature hanging around here for? Get rid of him.”7

  Finally in July, Zinoviev asked to be able to talk to Kamenev on his own. Then they demanded to speak to the Politburo: if the Party would guarantee there would be no executions, they would confess. Voroshilov was itching to get at the “scum”: when he received some of the testimonies against them, he wrote to Stalin that “these bad people . . . all typical representatives of petit bourgeois with the face of Trotsky . . . are finished people. There’s no place for them in our country and no place among the millions ready to die for the Motherland. This scum must be liquidated absolutely . . . we need to be sure the NKVD starts the purge properly . . .” Here, then, was one leader who genuinely seemed to approve of a terror and the liquidation of the former oppositions. On 3 July, Stalin replied to “dear Klim, did you read the testimonies . . . ? How do you like the bourgeois puppies of Trotsky . . . ? They wanted to wipe out all the members of the Politburo . . . Isn’t it weird? How low people can sink? J.St.”

  Yagoda accompanied these two broken men on the short drive from the Lubianka to the Kremlin, where they had both once lived. When they arrived in the room where Kamenev had chaired so many Politburo meetings, they discovered that only Stalin, Voroshilov and Yezhov were present. Where was the rest of the Politburo?

  Stalin replied that he and Voroshilov were a commission of the Politburo. Given Klim’s venom, it is easy to see why he was there, but where was Molotov? Perhaps the punctilious Iron-Arse was worried about the etiquette of lying to Old Bolsheviks: he certainly did not object to killing people.

  Kamenev begged the Politburo for a guarantee of their lives.

  “A guarantee?” replied Stalin, according to Orlov’s version. “What guarantee can there be? It’s simply ridiculous! Maybe you want an official treaty certified by the League of Nations? Zinoviev and Kamenev forget they’re not in a market-place haggling over a stolen horse but at the Politburo of the Bolshevik Communist Party. If an assurance by the Politburo is not enough, I don’t see any point in talking further.”

  “Zinoviev and Kamenev behave as if they’re in a position to make conditions to the Politburo,” exclaimed Voroshilov. “If they had any common sense, they’d fall to their knees before Stalin . . .”

  Stalin proposed three reasons why they would not be executed—it was really a trial of Trotsky; if he had not shot them when they were opposing the Party, then why shoot them when they were helping it; and finally, “the comrades forget that we are Bolsheviks, disciples and followers of Lenin, and we don’t want to shed the blood of Old Bolsheviks, no matter how grave their past sins . . .”

  Zinoviev and Kamenev wearily agreed to plead guilty, provided there were no shootings and their families were protected.

  “That goes without saying,” Stalin finished the meeting. 8

  Stalin set to work on the script for the Zinoviev trial, revelling in his hyperbolic talent as a hack playwright. The new archives reveal how he even dictated the words of the new Procurator-General, Andrei Vyshinsky, who kept notes of his leader’s perorations.9

  Stalin issued a secret circular of 29 July which announced that a terrorist leviathan named the “United Trotskyite-Zinovievite Centre” had attempted to assassinate Stalin, Voroshilov, Kaganovich, Kirov, Sergo, Zhdanov and others. These lists of purported targets became a bizarre honour since inclusion signified proximity to Stalin. One can imagine the leaders checking the list like schoolboys rushing to the noticeboard to make sure they are in the football team. Significantly, Molotov was not on the team, which was interpreted as a sign of opposition to the Terror but it seems he was indeed temporarily out of favour because of a different disagreement with Stalin. Molotov boasted, “I’d always supported the measures taken,” but there is one intriguing hint in the archives that Molotov was under fire from Yezhov. The NKVD ha
d arrested the German nurse of his daughter Svetlana Molotova90 and the Premier had grumbled to Yagoda. A Chekist denounced Molotov for “improper behaviour . . . Molotov behaved badly.” On 3 November, Yezhov sent Molotov the denunciation, perhaps a shot across his bows.10

  Yezhov was Stalin’s closest associate in the days before the trial while Yagoda, now in disfavour for his resistance to it, was received only once. Stalin complained about his work: “You work poorly. The NKVD suffers a serious disease.” Finally he called Yagoda, shouting that he would “punch him in the nose” if he did not pull himself together. We have Stalin’s notes from his 13 August meetings with Yezhov, which catch his mood. In one, he considers sacking an official: “Get him out? Yes, get him out! Talk with Yezhov.” Again and again: “Ask Yezhov.”11

  The first of the famous show trials opened on 19 August in the October Hall upstairs in the House of Unions. The 350 spectators were mainly NKVD clerks in plain clothes, foreign journalists and diplomats. On a raised dais in the centre, the three judges, led by Ulrikh, sat on portentous throne-like chairs covered in red cloth. The real star of this theatrical show, the Procurator-General Andrei Vyshinsky, whose performance of foaming ire and articulate pedantry would make him a European figure, sat to the audience’s left. The defendants, sixteen shabby husks, guarded by NKVD troopers with fixed bayonets, sat to the right. Behind them was a door that led to the suite that might be compared to the “celebrity hospitality green room” in television studios. Here in a drawing room with sandwiches and refreshments sat Yagoda who could confer with Vyshinsky and the defendants during the trial.