Stalin

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  63 The Gagra house is one of the most beautiful of Stalin’s residences but also the least accessible. The children later got their own houses. A snake path of steps twists down to the sea. Yet it is invisible from the land. Like most of these houses, it is still under the control of the Abkhazian presidential security, hidden, eerie but perfectly preserved. Museri adjoins the same secret CC resort, Pitsunda, where Khrushchev had a house as First Secretary and where, in the eighties, Mikhail Gorbachev and Raisa his wife were criticized for building a multi-million-pound holiday house. All remain empty yet guarded in the steamy Abkhazian heat.

  64 These provincials wanted to meet their heroes and a great amount of time was spent posing for the photographers in the hall where they gathered in eager groups, beaming, in their boots, tunics and caps, around Stalin, Kalinin, Voroshilov, Kaganovich and Budyonny. At the Fifteenth Congress in 1927, Stalin was just one of the leaders who posed with his fans. At the Seventeenth, Stalin is always at the centre. The album is mutilated by the huge number of figures either crossed out or cut out as they were arrested and executed during the following four years: out of 1,966 delegates, 1,108 would be arrested. Few survived.

  65 Named, of course, after Beria’s former patron, Ordzhonikidze, a friendship that had disintegrated into mutual hatred.

  66 It was no coincidence that he would become such a fan of Western cowboy movies.

  67 Among his possessions in his apartment, preserved in Leningrad, is one of his cigarette boxes emblazoned with an unprepossessing portrait of Stalin with a very long nose. The box is opened by pressing the nose.

  68 When Stalin read Andrei Platonov’s satire on the “Higher Command” of collectivization, For Future Use, he supposedly wrote “Bastard!” on the manuscript and told Fadeev, “Give him a belt ‘for future use.’ ” Platonov was never arrested but died, in great deprivation, of TB.

  69 There was one other returned émigré whom Stalin personally favoured. Ilya Ehrenburg, a Muscovite and Jewish Bohemian novelist, friends with Picasso and Malraux, complained of persecution by the Party. His old schoolfriend Bukharin appealed for him. Stalin scrawled on the letter: “To Comrade Kaganovich, pay attention to the attached document—don’t let the Communists drive Ehrenburg mad. J. Stalin.” Molotov and Bukharin helped Mandelstam. Voroshilov aided his own stable as well as his “court painter” Gerasimov. Kirov protected the Mariinsky Ballet, Yenukidze the Bolshoi. Yagoda patronised his own writers and architects, often meeting them at Gorky’s mansion. Poskrebyshev received the tenor Kozlovsky at home.

  70 His wife Zinaida was even prissier: she once told Svetlana Stalin that the urbane novelist Ehrenburg “loves Paris because there are naked women there.” It was Zinaida who was tactless enough to tell Svetlana her mother was mentally “sick.”

  71 Yury Zhdanov, the boy at table with Stalin, Kirov and his father, is the main source for this account and now lives in Rostov-on-Don where he generously agreed to be interviewed for this book. The holiday became famous because of Kirov’s fate soon afterwards: it forms a set piece in Anatoly Rybakov’s novel Children of the Arbat . Yury Zhdanov remembers Stalin asking him: “What was the genius of Catherine the Great?” He answered his own question. “Her greatness lay in her choice of Prince Potemkin and other such talented lovers and officials to govern the State.”

  72 When the writer Mikhail Sholokhov criticized the praise for the leader, Stalin replied with a sly smile, “What can I do? The people need a god.”

  73 After the Seventeenth Congress, formal Politburo meetings became gradually less frequent. Often a Politburo sitting was really just Stalin chatting with a couple of comrades: Poskrebyshev’s minutes are simply marked “Comrades Stalin, Molotov, Kaganovich—for” and the others were sometimes telephoned by Poskrebyshev who marked their votes and signed his “P” underneath. By the end of the year, there was one meeting in September, none in October and one in November.

  74 Instantsiya derives from the nineteenth-century German usage of aller instanzen, meaning to appeal to the highest court.

  75 The Taurida Palace had been the scene of Prince Potemkin’s extravagant ball for Catherine the Great in 1791 but it was also the home of the Duma, the Parliament gingerly granted by Nicholas II after the 1905 Revolution. In 1918, the palace housed the Constituent Assembly that Lenin ordered shut down by drunken Red Guards. It was thus both the birthplace and graveyard of Russia’s first two democracies before 1991.

  76 This brain study was part of the rationalist-scientific ritual of the death of great Bolsheviks. Lenin’s brain had been extracted and was now studied at the Institute of the Brain. When Gorky died, his brain was delivered there too. This was surely a scientific Marxist distortion of the tradition in the Romantic age for the hearts of great men, whether Mirabeau or Potemkin, to be buried separately. But the age of the heart was over.

  77 Maria’s poem reveals both the devotion and cheekiness of Stalin’s female courtiers: “We wish much happiness to our Dear Leader and endless life. Let the enemies be scared off. Liquidate all Fascists . . . Next year, take the world under your sway, and rule all mankind. Shame the ladies can’t go West to Carlsbad. It’s all the same at Sochi.”

  78 Even today, those that know such secrets persist in believing, in the words of Stalin’s adopted son General Artyom Sergeev, now eighty, that his “private life is secret and irrelevant to his place in history.”

  79 Here was Stalin’s version of Harold Macmillan’s “You’ve never had it so good.”

  80 The star was his wife Liuba Orlova and the songs were by the Jewish songwriter Isaac Dunaevsky. The Russians, emerging from an era of starvation and assassination, flocked to see musicals and comedies—like Americans during the Depression. The style was singing, dancing and slapstick: a pig jumps onto a banqueting table, causing much messy hilarity with trotters and snout.

  81 Mikoyan and Chubar, a senior official in Ukraine, as the two senior candidate members of the Politburo, were made full members, with Zhdanov and Eikhe, boss of West Siberia, taking their place as candidates.

  82 This dacha, built by a Jewish millionaire, later known as Dom (house of) Ordzhonikidze and now notorious as “Stalin’s house,” was a favourite of the leadership: the founder of the Cheka, Felix Dzerzhinsky, often stayed there. Trotsky was recuperating there at the time of Lenin’s death when Stalin and Ordzhonikidze managed to ensure he missed the funeral. Stalin (and Beria) stayed here after World War II: the grand billiard room was installed specially for him and he took a great interest in the lush trees and flowers planted by local Party bosses up to his death. In one of the most sinister parts of the research for this book, the author stayed almost alone in this strange but historic house, probably in Mandelstam’s attic.

  83 As Stalin wrote his history books with his dear friends Zhdanov and Kirov, he was receiving detailed reports on the health of his “precious” comrade. The Yezhov case is a classic illustration of the Party’s obsessive control over every detail of its leaders. “The radioactive baths of Badgastein” had improved Yezhov’s health, the embassy reported after five days. A few days later, the patient was feeling energyless after the baths, he was following a diet but he was still chain smoking—and the sores on his thighs and legs had almost disappeared. The CC voted to send him the huge sum of 1,000 roubles. Next he had pains in his appendix, but having consulted Moscow doctors, Kaganovich sent an order that he was not to undergo surgery “unless absolutely necessary.” After another rest in an Italian sanatorium, the Yezhovs returned that autumn.

  84 Ignoring the fall of Uncle Abel, Svetlana decided she wanted to go to the dacha at Lipki, which had been Nadya’s choice for a holiday home, all decorated in her style. Stalin agreed, even though “it was hard for Joseph to be there,” wrote Maria. The whole wider family, along with Mikoyan, set off in a convoy of cars. Stalin was very warm towards Mikoyan. Svetlana asked if she could stay up for dinner and Stalin let her. Vasily too was often at dinner with the adults.

  85 In his entour
age, Stalin even called Bukharin “Shuisky,” according to Kaganovich, referring either to the Shuisky family of boyars who lorded it over the young Ivan, or the so-called “Boyars’ Tsar” after Ivan’s death. Either way, Stalin was identifying his own position with that of Ivan against his boyars.

  86 When he received no reply, again showing the attitude of the local bosses to the centre, Poskrebyshev chased up the Kazakh First Secretary: “We have not received confirmation of our order.” This time, the local boss replied instantly. But this only illustrates how the regional viceroys ignored Moscow in small matters and great, following the old Russian tradition of apparent obedience while avoiding actual execution of orders.

  87 Khozyaika means mistress, the female of Khozyain, boss, master, Stalin’s nickname among the bureaucracy, though it also usually means “housewife.”

  88 In case we have forgotten that this was a state based on repression, Zhdanov and Mikoyan were inspecting the NKVD’s slave labour projects in the Arctic such as the Belomor Canal: “the Chekists here have done a great job,” Zhdanov wrote enthusiastically to Stalin. “They allow ex-kulaks and criminal elements to work for socialism and they may become real people . . .”

  89 An old trick: Kuibyshev had suggested printing false issues of Pravda to deceive the dying Lenin.

  90 Many of the ruling families employed ethnic Germans as housekeepers and nannies: Carolina Til managed Stalin’s house; another Volga German ran Molotov’s and the Berias employed Ella as their nanny-housekeeper. They would all prove vulnerable to the anti-German Terror of 1937.

  91 Not all the off-stage cast behaved so conveniently. At 5:46 p.m. on 22 August, Stalin received the following telegram from Kaganovich, Yezhov and Ordzhonikidze: “This morning Tomsky shot himself. He left a letter to you in which he tried to prove his innocence . . . We have no doubt that Tomsky . . . knowing that now it is no longer possible to hide his place in the Zinoviev-Trotskyite band had decided to dissemble . . . by suicide . . .” As ever, the press release was the most important thing.

  92 Stalin had just sent Mikoyan on a 12,000-mile tour of the American food industry. The shrewd Armenian made sure Stalin knew that he supported the verdict, writing to “dear Lazar” Kaganovich from Chicago: “Don’t forget to write in your next letter to him that I send my warmest greetings to Our Master. How good that we have so quickly got rid of the Trotskyite gang of Zinoviev and Kamenev!” Mikoyan met Secretary of State Cordell Hull in Washington, D.C., discussed manufacturing with Henry Ford—and inspected Macy’s in New York. The trip had two effects: Mikoyan gave the Russians American hamburgers and ice cream, and he lost his taste for wearing the Party tunic, sporting natty American-style suits for the rest of his career.

  93 There were many Chekists who sometimes doubled as executioners but Blokhin himself, assisted by two murderous brothers,Vasily and Ivan Zhigarev, handled important cases. V. M. Blokhin, a veteran of the Tsarist army in the First World War and a Chekist since March 1921, had risen to head the Kommandatura Branch that was attached to the Administrative Executive Department. This meant he was in charge of the internal prison at Lubianka; among other things, he was responsible for executions. Major-General Blokhin was retired after Stalin’s death and praised for his “irreproachable service” by Beria himself. After Beria’s fall, he was stripped of rank in November 1954 and died on 3 February 1955.

  94 When he was arrested they were found among his belongings and passed on to Yezhov who also kept them until his downfall.

  95 Zinoviev seems unlikely to have recited the Shema prayer, the holiest in Jewish faith, since he, like all the Jews among these internationalist Bolsheviks, despised religion, but equally he would have remembered it from his childhood.

  96 On the subject of Stalin’s “barrow boy” tendencies, he was always interested in discounts in his foreign dealings: “How much was the purchase of the Italian warship?” he wrote to Voroshilov. “If we buy two warships, what discount can they give us? Stalin.”

  97 Stalin had started to use this charmingly small house, a picturesque yellow bungalow on the hillside at Novy Afon, in 1935. There were walks up the hill to a summerhouse where Stalin held barbecues. Later he would build another house next to the first that would become one of his favourite residences in old age. Now used by the President of Abkhazia, it is fully staffed. When the author visited in 2002, the manageress invited him to stay and offered to hold a banquet in his honour in Stalin’s dining room.

  98 Interestingly, none of these candidates are ethnic Russians but a Jew, an Armenian and an Abkhazian. Some historians believe there had always been a secret policy of placing Poles, Balts and Jews and other minorities to perform the unsavoury roles in the NKVD. This is credible but it is true that Stalin desperately needed NKVD officials he trusted: he was often closest to his fellow Caucasians. He had no interest in provoking Russian resentment of Georgians in high positions. Besides, three of his secret-police chiefs were Russians (including Yezhov).

  99 In West Siberia, there was a regional show trial of “wreckers” accused of trying to murder the local leader Eikhe—and of trying to assassinate Molotov during his earlier trip there. His driver testified that he planned to sacrifice himself and kill Molotov by driving over a precipice but he lost his nerve and only managed to capsize the car in a muddy rut. No doubt this cock-and-bull story consoled Molotov for being left off the list for the Zinoviev trial.

  100 “Men have gone to heaven for smaller things than that,” wrote Oscar Wilde in De Profundis about Robbie Ross waiting among the crowd at Reading Station and being the only one to step forward and raise his hat as the disgraced writer travelled to Reading Gaol. The stakes were even higher for Sergo.

  101 Stalin’s political and personal obsessions often found a parallel in his favourite operas: he constantly attended performances of the opera Ivan Susanin by Glinka but only waited until the scene when the Poles are lured into a forest by a Russian and freeze to death there. He would then leave the theatre and go home.

  102 Ekaterina Voroshilova wrote twenty years later in her diaries: maybe Zinaida “was right that Ordzhonikidze was a man of great soul but on this I have my own opinion.” Sergo’s daughter Eteri recalled how Stalin called a couple of times to comfort the widow and then no one called them. Only Kaganovich still visited them. Years later, Khrushchev praised Sergo at Kuntsevo. Beria was insulting about him. Stalin said nothing. But when they left, Malenkov pulled Khrushchev aside: “Listen, why did you speak so carelessly about Sergo? He shot himself . . . Didn’t you know? Didn’t you notice how awkward it was after you said his name?” Nonetheless the city of Vladikavkaz, in the Caucasus, was renamed Ordzhonikidze.

  103 Natalya Rykova survived fifteen years of slave labour on the White Sea because “of the beauty of nature that I saw every day in the forests and the kindness of people for there were more kind people than bad people.” The author thanks Natalya Rykova, aged eighty-five, indomitable and alive today in Moscow, who generously told her story without bitterness, but with tears running down her cheeks. Anna Larina was parted from her and Bukharin’s baby son. But she too survived and wrote her memoirs.

  104 Semyon Budyonny published his conventional, cautious memoirs long after Stalin’s death but his personal notes, seventy-six mainly unpublished pages preserved by his daughter, provide fascinating glimpses of the time. I am grateful to Nina Budyonny for allowing me to use them.

  105 Her apartment contained busts of Stalin and portraits of Lenin and Stalin. She owned 505 roubles in bonds but left 42 roubles and 20 kopeks in cash and 4,533 roubles to her lady friends plus lottery tickets worth 3 roubles. In her bedroom, there were a few packs of cigarettes, and more portraits of Stalin and, tellingly, Beria.

  106 Sometimes they realized they had not been vicious enough, hence Veinberg wrote: “Today when I voted for the expulsion of Rudzutak and Tukhachevsky from the Central Committee, I remembered that in voting for the expulsion of . . . Eliava and Orakhelashvili, I accidentally forgot to ad
d the words ‘and removal of their files to the NKVD’ so I inform you I’m voting for the expulsion of all these traitors but also the removal of their files to the NKVD.”

  107 A typically sinister note from Voroshilov to Yezhov read like this: “N[ikolai] I[vanovich]! Nikolayev inquired whether Uritsky should be arrested. When can you take him in? You’ve already managed to take in Slavin and Bazenkov. It would be good if you could take in Todorsky . . . KV.” All named, except Todorovsky, were shot.

  108 Just after the announcement of the shooting of the generals, Mekhlis discovered that the “Proletarian Poet” Demian Bedny was resisting orders and secretly writing Dantean verses under the pseudonym Conrad Rotkehempfer. But Mekhlis immediately wrote to Stalin: “What should I do? He explained it was his own literary method.” Stalin replied with dripping sarcasm: “I’m answering with a letter you can read to Demian. To the new apparent Dante, alias Conrad, oh actually to Demian Bedny, the fable or poem ‘Fight or Die’ is mediocre. As a criticism of Fascism, it’s unoriginal and faded. As a criticism of Soviet construction (not joking), it’s silly but transparent. It’s junk but since we [Soviet people] have a lot of junk around, we must increase the supply of other kinds of literature with another fable . . . I understand that I must say sorry to Demian-Dante for my frankness.” Mekhlis locked Stalin’s letters in his safe whence he extracted them to impress journalists whom he asked if they recognized the handwriting. “In the middle of the night of 21 July,” he reported urgently to Stalin, “I invited Bedny to criticize his poem” and to hear Stalin’s damning letter. Bedny just said, “I’m crazy . . . maybe I’m too old. Maybe I should go to the country and grow cabbages.” Even this comment struck Mekhlis as suspicious and he floated the idea of arresting Bedny: “Maybe he’s implicated.” Stalin did not rise. Bedny was cut from Stalin’s circle but remained free, dying in 1945.