Stalin

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  PART FIVE

  Slaughter: Beria Arrives 1938–1939

  24

  Stalin’s Jewesses and the Family in Danger

  Once, when Stalin was resting at Zubalovo, Pavel and Zhenya Alliluyev’s middle child Sergei kept crying and the parents worried that he would be disturbed. Pavel, who had a hysterical temper like his sister Nadya, slapped his daughter Kira for not keeping him quiet. Kira, now a teenager, was irrepressible and, having grown up around Stalin, could not understand the danger. When she refused to eat something Stalin offered her, Pavel kicked her under the table. Yet the children played around Stalin and his killers as obliviously as birds fluttering in and out of a crocodile’s open mouth.

  Stalin still visited his comrades’ houses, often calling at Poskrebyshev’s for dinner where there was dancing and he played charades. Poskrebyshev had recently married a sparky girl who had joined Stalin’s circle. In 1934, this unlikely romantic hero went to a party at the house of the Kremlin doctor Mikhail Metalikov, whose wife Asya was indirectly related to Trotsky, her sister being married to his son, Sedov. Metalikov’s real name was Masenkis, a family of Jewish Lithuanian sugar barons, a dangerous combination.

  Metalikov’s sister was Bronislava, dark and lithe, full of the energy and playfulness that was so often missing from Old Bolshevik women. The 24-year-old Bronka was married to a lawyer with whom she already had a daughter, while qualifying as an endocrinologist. Photographs show her slim, mischievous elegance in a polka-dot dress. That day at the party, she was playing some sort of game, running round the table from which Poskrebyshev, Stalin’s simian chef de cabinet of forty-three, watched her. When she started a food fight, she threw a cake that missed its target and landed right on Poskrebyshev’s Party tunic: he fell in love with Bronka and married her soon afterwards. Family photographs show the worshipful devotion of Poskrebyshev, who appears in history as a Quasimodo but is seen here as the loving husband resting his head on his wife’s lustrous shoulder, nuzzling her brown hair.

  Beauty and the Beast caused much merriment in Stalin’s entourage: Kira Alliluyeva heard “Poskrebyshev’s beautiful Polish wife joke that he was so ugly that she only went to bed with him in the dark.” But Poskrebyshev was proud of his ugliness: Stalin chose him for his hideous countenance. He cheerfully played court jester: Stalin dared Poskrebyshev to drink a glass of vodka in one gulp without a sip of water or to see how long he could hold up his hands with burning paper under each nail.

  “Look!” Stalin would laugh, “Sasha can drink a glass of vodka and not even wrinkle his nose!” Stalin liked Bronka, one of a new generation of lighthearted girls, secure in the heart of the élite, where she was accustomed to meet the magnates. She called Stalin the familiar ty and if she travelled abroad, she, like the Alliluyev women, always brought a present for Svetlana, calling Stalin to ask if she could give it. “Will it suit her?” he asked about a Western pullover.

  “Oh yes!”

  “Then give it to her!”

  Bronka’s best friend was Yevgenia Yezhova, editor and irrepressible literary groupie. These two giggly and flighty glamour pusses of Jewish Polish or Lithuanian origins were so similar that Kira Alliluyeva thought they were sisters. They even shared the same patronymic Solomonova though they were no relation. Yezhov and Poskrebyshev were close friends too— they would go fishing together while their wives gossiped.1

  While Blackberry, now promoted to candidate Politburo member, massacred his victims, his wife was friends with all the artistic stars and slept with many of them. The enchanting Isaac Babel was Yezhova’s chief lion: “If you invited people ‘for Babel,’ they all came,” wrote Babel’s wife, Pirozhkova. Solomon Mikhoels, the Yiddish actor who performed King Lear for Stalin, jazz-band leader Leonid Utesov, film director Eisenstein, novelist Mikhail Sholokhov and journalist Mikhail Koltsov attended the salon of this fascinating flibbertigibbet. At the Kremlin parties, Yezhova fox-trotted the most, not missing a dance. Her best friend, Zinaida Glikina, had also created a literary salon. When her marriage broke up, Yezhov invited her to live with them and seduced her. She was far from being his only mistress, while Yevgenia enthusiastically pursued literary affairs with Babel, Koltsov and Sholokhov. Few refused an invitation from Yezhov’s wife: “Just think,” Babel said, “our girl from Odessa has become the first lady of the kingdom!”2

  After Nadya’s death, there was a rumour that Stalin fell in love with and married Lazar Kaganovich’s sister, Rosa, his niece (also named Rosa) or his daughter Maya. This was repeated and widely believed: there were even photographs showing Rosa Kaganovich as a dark pretty woman. The Kaganoviches were a good-looking family—Lazar himself was handsome as a young man and his daughter Maya grew up to be compared to Elizabeth Taylor. The significance of the story was that Stalin had a Jewish wife, useful propaganda for the Nazis who had an interest in merging the Jewish and Bolshevik devils into Mr. and Mrs. Stalin. The Kaganoviches, father and daughter, were so emphatic in their denials that they perhaps protested too much but it seems this particular story is a myth.128

  The story is doubly ironic since the Nazis had no need to invent such a character: Stalin was surrounded by Jewesses—from Polina Molotova and Maria Svanidze to Poskrebysheva and Yezhova. Beria’s son, reliable on gossip, dubious on politics, recalled that his father gleefully listed Stalin’s affairs with Jewesses.3

  These pretty young Jewesses fluttered around Stalin but they were all of “dubious origins.” They were more interested in clothes, jokes and affairs than dialectical materialism. Along with Zhenya Alliluyeva and Maria Svanidze, they were surely the life and soul of this fatally interwoven society of Stalin’s family and comrades. Stanislas Redens, chief of the Moscow NKVD, often took his family and the other Alliluyevs over to the Yezhovs. The children were fascinated by the NKVD boss: “Yezhov pranced down the steps in the full dress uniform of Commissar-General in a rather scary way as if he was very full of himself,” recalls Leonid Redens. “He was so sullen while my father was so open.” Kira Alliluyeva enjoyed the frothy banter of Yevgenia Yezhova and Bronka Poskrebysheva. Yezhov, who worked all night, was usually too tired to socialize so Kira and the other teenagers hid behind a curtain. When the minuscule Blackberry strode past in his boots, they started giggling. But their fathers, Pavel Alliluyev and Stanislas Redens, who understood what was at stake, were furious with them—but how could they explain how dangerous a game it was? Now, the promiscuous horseplay of the women around Stalin made them suddenly vulnerable.

  In the spring, Stalin began to distance himself from the family, whose gossipy arrogance suddenly seemed suspicious. When they gathered at his apartment for Svetlana’s eleventh birthday on 28 February 1937, Yakov, Stalin’s gentle Georgian son, brought Julia, his Jewish wife, for the first time. She had been married to a Chekist bodyguard when she met Yakov through the Redens, whom Stalin immediately blamed for making a match with “that Jewish woman.” Maria Svanidze, always intriguing, called Julia “an adventuress” and tried to persuade Stalin.

  “Joseph, it’s impossible. You must interfere!” This was enough to win Stalin’s sympathy for his son.

  “A man loves the woman he loves!” he retorted, whether she was a “princess or a seamstress.” After they married and had their daughter Gulia, Stalin noticed how well Julia kept Yakov’s clothes. She was a baba after all. “Now I see your wife’s a good thing,” Stalin finally told Yasha who lived with his little family in the grand apartment building on Granovsky Street. When Stalin finally met Julia, he liked her, made a fuss of her and even fed her with a fork like a loving Georgian father-in-law.

  Stalin, losing patience with the family, did not attend the party. Maria Svanidze thought she could understand why: the Alliluyevs were useless: “crazy Olga, idiot Fyodor, imbecilic Pavel and Niura [Anna Redens], narrow-minded Stan [Redens], lazy Vasya [Vasily Stalin], soppy Yasha [Djugashvili]. The only normal people are Alyosha, Zhenya and me and . . . Svetlana.” This was ironic since it was the Svanidzes who were
the first to fall. Maria herself was ebulliently egotistical, tormenting her own husband with letters that boasted, “I’m better looking than 70% of Bolshevik wives . . . Anyone who meets me remembers forever.” This was true but far from helpful at Stalin’s court. One pities these haughty, decent women who found themselves in the quagmire of this place and time which they so little understood. 4

  That spring, Stalin and Pavel played Svanidze and Redens at billiards. The losers traditionally had to crawl under the table as their penalty. When Stalin’s side lost, Pavel diplomatically suggested that the children, Kira and Sergei, should crawl under the table for them. Sergei did not mind—he was only nine—but Kira, who was eighteen, refused defiantly. As outspoken as her mother and fearless with it, she insisted that Stalin and her father had lost and under the table they should go. Pavel became hysterical and clipped her with the billiard cue.

  Soon afterwards, Stalin and the blue-eyed, dandyish Svanidze suddenly ceased to be “like brothers.” “Alyosha was quite a liberal, a European,” explained Molotov. “Stalin sensed this . . .” Svanidze was Deputy Chairman of the State Bank, an institution filled with urbane cosmopolitans now under grave suspicion. On 2 April 1937, Stalin wrote an ominous note to Yezhov: “Purge the staff of the State Bank.” Svanidze had also done secret and sensitive work for Stalin over the years. Maria Svanidze’s diary stopped in the middle of the year: her access to Stalin had suddenly ended. By 21 December, they were under investigation and not invited for Stalin’s birthday which must have been agony for Maria. Days later, the Svanidzes visited Zhenya and Pavel Alliluyev in the House on the Embankment (where they all lived). Maria showed off her low-cut velvet dress. After they left at midnight, Zhenya and Kira were doing the dishes when the bell rang. It was Maria’s son from her first marriage: “Mama and Alyosha have been arrested. She was taken away in her beautiful clothes.” A few months later, Zhenya received a letter from Maria who begged her to pass it on to Stalin: “If I don’t leave this camp, I’ll die.” She took the letter to Stalin who warned her: “Don’t ever do this again!”

  Maria was moved to a harsher prison. Zhenya sensed the danger for her and her children of being so close to Stalin, although she adored him until the end of her days, despite her terrible misfortunes. She drew back from Stalin while nagging Pavel to speak to him about their arrested friends. Apparently he did so: “They’re my friends—so put me in jail too!” Some were released.

  The other Alliluyevs also did their bit: grandmother Olga, living a grande dame’s life in the Kremlin, said little. While the others believed that Stalin did not know the details and was being tricked by the NKVD, she alone of this ship of fools understood: “nothing happens that he does not know about.” But her estranged husband, the respected Sergei, appealed repeatedly to Stalin, waiting for him on the sofa in his apartment. Oftentimes he fell asleep there and awoke in the early hours to find Stalin arriving from dinner. There and then he begged for someone’s life. Stalin teased his father-in-law by repeating his favourite expression: “Exactly exactly”: “So you came to see me, ‘Exactly Exactly,’ ” Stalin joked.

  Just after Svanidze’s arrest, Mikoyan arrived as normal at Kuntsevo for dinner with Stalin who, knowing how close he was to Alyosha, walked straight up to him and said: “Did you hear we’ve arrested Svanidze?”

  “Yes . . . but how could it happen?”

  “He’s a German spy,” replied Stalin.

  “How can it be?” replied Mikoyan. “There’s no evidence of his sabotage. What’s the benefit of a spy who does nothing?”

  Stalin explained that Svanidze was a “special sort of spy,” recruited when he was a German prisoner during the Great War, whose job was simply to provide information. Presumably, after this revelation, dinner at Stalin’s continued as usual.5

  Once a leader was under attack, the Terror followed its own momentum. Just demoted, Postyshev, the tough, sallow-faced and arrogant “prince” of the Ukraine, who had so entertained Stalin by slow-dancing with Molotov, frantically proved his ferocity by eliminating virtually the entire bureaucracy in the Volga town of Kuibyshev.129 Now, at the Plenum in January 1938, he was to be destroyed for killing the wrong people.

  “The Soviet and Party leaderships were in Enemy hands,” claimed Postyshev.

  “All of it? From top to bottom?” interrupted Mikoyan.

  “Weren’t there any honest people?” asked Bulganin.

  “Aren’t you exaggerating, Comrade Postyshev?” added Molotov.

  “But there were errors,” Kaganovich declared, a cue to Postyshev to say:

  “I shall talk about my personal errors.”

  “I want you to tell the truth,” said Beria.

  “Please permit me to finish and explain the whole business to the best of my ability,” Postyshev pleaded at which Kaganovich boomed: “You’re not very good at explaining it—that’s the whole point.”

  Postyshev got up to defend himself but Andreyev snapped: “Comrade Postyshev, take your seat. This is no place for strolling around.” Postyshev’s strolling days were over: Malenkov attacked him. Stalin proposed his demotion from the Politburo: Khrushchev, who was soon appointed to run the Ukraine, replaced him as candidate member, stepping into the front rank. But the attacks on Postyshev contained a warning for Yezhov whose arrests were increasingly frenzied. Meanwhile Stalin seemed undecided about Postyshev:130 his high-handedness attracted enemies who perhaps persuaded Stalin to destroy him. His last hope was a personal appeal to Stalin, probably written after a confrontation with his accusers: “Comrade Stalin, I ask you to receive me after the meeting.”

  “I cannot receive you today,” Stalin wrote back. “Talk to Comrade Molotov.” Within days, he had been arrested.6 Stalin signed another order for 48,000 executions by quota while Marshal Yegorov followed his “beautiful” wife into the “meat grinder.” But Yezhov was already so exhausted that on 1 December 1937, Stalin was commissioned to supervise his week-long holiday.7

  In early February, a drunken Blackberry led an expedition to purge Kiev where, aided by the new Ukrainian viceroy Khrushchev,131 another 30,000 were arrested. Arriving to find that virtually the whole Ukrainian Politburo had been purged under his predecessor Kosior, Khrushchev went on to arrest several commissars and their deputies. The Politburo approved 2,140 victims on Khrushchev’s lists for shooting. Here again, he over-fulfilled his quota. In 1938, 106,119 people were arrested in Khrushchev’s Ukrainian Terror. Yezhov’s visit accelerated the bloodbath: “After Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov’s trip to Ukraine . . . the real destruction of hidden Enemies began,” announced Khrushchev, hailed as an “unswerving Stalinist” for his “merciless uprooting of Enemies.” The NKVD unveiled a conspiracy to poison horses and arrested two professors as Nazi agents. Khrushchev tested the so-called poison and discovered that it did not kill horses. Only after three different commissions had been appointed did he prove this particular conspiracy to be false—but one suspects that Khrushchev only questioned the NKVD’s work when Stalin had signalled his displeasure.8

  In his cups in Kiev, Yezhov displayed alarming recklessness, boasting that the Politburo was “in his hands.” He could arrest anyone he wanted, even the leaders. One night he was literally carried home from a banquet. It could not be long before Stalin heard of his excesses, if not his dangerous boasting.9

  Yezhov returned in time for the third and last show trial of the “Anti-Soviet Bloc of Rightists and Trotskyites” which opened on 2 March, starring Bukharin, Rykov and Yagoda, who admitted killing Kirov and Gorky among others. Bukharin scored his own private triumph in a confession of guilt, laced with oblique Aesopian mockery of Stalin and Yezhov’s infantile plots. But this changed nothing. Yezhov attended the executions. He is said to have ordered Yagoda to be beaten: “Come on, hit him for all of us.”

  But there was a hint of humanity when it came to the death of his old drinking companion, Yagoda’s ex-secretary Bulanov: he had him given some brandy.10

  When it was over, Yezho
v proposed a fourth super-trial against the Polish spies in the Comintern, which he had been preparing for months. But Stalin cancelled the trial. He rarely pursued one policy to the exclusion of all others: Stalin’s antennae sensed that the massacre was exhausting his own lieutenants, especially the louche Blackberry himself.

  25

  Beria and the Weariness of Hangmen

  On 4 April, Yezhov was appointed Commissar of Water Transport which made some sense since the building of canals was the task of the NKVD’s slave labour. But there was a worrying symmetry because Yagoda had been appointed to a similar Commissariat on his dismissal. Meanwhile Yezhov ravaged even the Politburo: Postyshev was being interrogated; Eikhe of West Siberia was arrested. Stalin promoted Kosior from Kiev to Moscow as Soviet Deputy Premier. However, in April 1938, Kosior’s brother was arrested. His one hope was to denounce his kin.

  “I’m living under suspicion and distrust,” he wrote to Stalin. “You can’t imagine how that feels to an innocent man. The arrest of my brother casts a shadow over me too . . . I swear on my life I’ve not only never suspected the real nature of Casimir Kosior, he was never close to me . . . Why has he invented all this? I can’t understand it but Comrade Stalin, it was all invented from start to finish . . . I ask you Comrade Stalin and all the Politburo to let me explain myself. I am a victim of an Enemy’s lies. Sometimes I think this is a silly dream. . .” How often these victims compared their plight to a “dream.” On 3 May he was arrested, followed by Chubar. Kaganovich claimed, “I protected Kosior and Chubar,” but faced with their handwritten confessions, “I gave up.”1