Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin

by Catherine Merridale

  Stories of the domestic, even modest, style of life in the Kremlin are confirmed by almost every source. It was the corrupting miasma of power, rather than wealth alone, that ruined children like Vyacheslav Molotov’s daughter, who began abusing alcohol in her schooldays.80 Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana Allilueva, insisted that her childhood was comfortable but not opulent. ‘The apartment had two rooms for the children and I shared mine with Nanny,’ she wrote. ‘There was no room for pictures on the walls – they were lined with books. In addition there was a library, Nadya’s [Stalin’s wife’s] room, and Stalin’s tiny bedroom in which stood a table of telephones … It was homely, with bourgeois furniture.’81 Many other apartments felt more like sparse hotel-suites, and some seemed distinctly under-furnished, for the better relics from the palaces – fine chairs and sideboards, gilded mirrors and the like – had all been requisitioned and exported by the vultures from the Finance Commissariat.82 ‘We lived as if on an island,’ Nami Mikoyan recalled. ‘But it was neither exotic nor luxurious. Behind its red-brick walls, it was more like a comfortable, silent prison.’83

  Another resident did add, however, that the service in the citadel was faultless: ‘polite, discreet, modest’.84 In this land of proletarian freedom, the servants who loaded the Kremlin’s wood-burning stoves each morning were asked to wear soft slippers so that the commissars could sleep.85 ‘The comfort was apparent,’ Nami Mikoyan remarked, ‘in the cleanliness of the linen.’86 There were maids and there were nurses, and any man in the circle of power could expect dancers and actresses to come and share a glass of wine after a performance. Vlasik and Poskrebyshev loved young women, Enukidze was keen on the ballet, Bonch-Bruevich held legendary parties for the artistic set, and Mikhail Kalinin, the ageing prime minister, was fond of operetta.87 Even the most popular theatrical stars knew that they had no option if they were asked to a late dinner. There were plenty of talented women in the Siberian labour camps.

  Liaisons between politicians and attractive female stars were permitted (and, in the hidden eyries of the secret police, welcomed) because they left the perpetrators open to blackmail.88 Scandals, however, were a different affair, for Soviet leaders were expected to present a moral public face. Their most indulgent parties took place safely out of Moscow, in their dachas and at holiday resorts. Everyone knew that Enukidze liked his dancers and that secret-police chief Yagoda was dissolute, but if their private lives stayed out of sight the myth of the good Bolshevik endured. When Kalinin and a glamorous guest, the prima donna Tatiana Balch, were caught in a Moscow city traffic-jam one evening, they paid dearly for their indiscretion. A crowd formed round the marooned car, and citizens, recognizing the politician and the soft-fleshed beauty at his side, began to whistle and to throw insults, followed by stones and lumps of mud.89 Like a naughty schoolboy, the grand old man of Russian politics faced an awkward audience with Stalin the next morning.

  It was not the white sheets and the scented soap, then, but access to information and to a stock of patronage that made life in the Kremlin such a prize. To leave the fortress was to lose almost everything. Even in the 1920s, when parts of the citadel were real slums, it had proved near-impossible to move residents out.90 From Bonch-Bruevich to the proletarian poet Demyan Bedny, the Kremlin’s occupants used every guile to hold on to their flats.91 If someone died, there was a stampede to secure their space. In 1931, in an attempt to reduce overcrowding on the hill, some were invited to move into the newly completed House on the Embankment, a luxury apartment block with views over the Moscow river, but the response was very slow. The new place might have had its own spa and closed shops, a clinic and a cinema, and it even boasted central heating and unlimited hot water in place of the Kremlin’s shared old bathrooms and old-fashioned stoves, but everyone knew that the only place for an ambitious politician was inside the fort.

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  On the night of 8 November 1932, while her husband was lingering at a Kremlin dinner to celebrate the fifteenth anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution, Stalin’s wife, Nadezhda Allilueva, retreated to her prettily furnished bedroom with its raspberry-pink rug. She was dressed for a party, but she pulled out the rose she had been wearing in her hair. She then threw off the coat that she had donned to take her final, troubled, walk around the palace. Stepping over to the dressing-table where she kept her bottles of Chanel perfume, she picked up the Walther pistol that her brother had sent her from Berlin and shot herself through the heart.92 Stalin did not look for her when he went to bed in his own small chamber, so it was the housekeeper, Karolina Till, who found the body lying in a pool of blood the following morning. ‘It was all so strange,’ recalled Svetlana, who was not yet seven at the time. ‘Suddenly everyone was crying and we were sent away to the dacha, to Zubalovo.’93

  Nadezhda had succumbed to depression and strain. She could no longer tolerate the tales of peasant suffering, the deaths, the lies. Stalin did not attend her burial at the Novodevichy Monastery, but the loss struck him more deeply than he ever acknowledged. In the short term, he quit the Kremlin apartment that they had shared (he swapped with Bukharin at first, and then moved into the Senate). More generally, however, the death, which Stalin seems to have experienced as a betrayal, drove him to take extreme measures. As the official news went out that Nadezhda had died of appendicitis, his staff prepared to stifle the truth. Kremlin servants who knew the story were dismissed or arrested one by one. By the end of 1935, it was safe to assume that every cleaner and every cook who served in the citadel reported directly to the secret police. Files in the archive of Nikolai Ezhov, who later headed the Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD), show that the campaign to cover up the reasons for Nadezhda’s death began at once and dragged on until the eve of the coming war. Among the victims were the Kremlin commandant, Rudolf Peterson, who was held to account for the fact that the story had leaked at all, and Nadezhda’s godfather, Abel Enukidze, the head of the Central Executive Commission and the man who really ran the Kremlin lives of the elite.

  But Stalin’s better-planned campaigns were always designed to hit more than one target. Nadezhda’s death coincided with his long-running vendetta against Lenin’s one-time aides, Lev Kamenev and Grigorii Zinoviev. Neither presented a viable threat to anything in 1932, but Stalin’s preferred tactic was to destroy an enemy completely, not just move him aside. For that reason, the files that the police assembled from the summer of 1933, case by case, included questions that touched on Nadezhda, on Kremlin gossip, but also on the supposed crimes of Stalin’s old foes. Everything was made to connect, and the first that many frightened witnesses (or defendants) would know about the overall design was when an odd, irrelevant and unexpected question came up in their second, third or later police interrogation. By that stage, most would have been too confused to dodge the bullet.

  In the summer of 1933, a member of staff in the Central Executive Commission’s library in the Kremlin reported that some people in her team were borrowing foreign journals. One librarian in particular, a former aristocrat with a professional interest in Persia, also appeared to be following too much gossip, to the point of noticing the cars that Party leaders drove. According to her boss, this woman, called Mukhanova, had an interest in signalling systems, and her brother was an engineer. To crown it all, she happened to be a friend of the Kamenevs, and her circle included several former Trotskyists.94 They were all helping each other, sometimes over apartments or food, sometimes over Kremlin passes. Such things were just what the police needed to know.

  The case (a web of fabrication) went no further that summer, and it could have ended, like many others, as a file in the vaults of the Lubyanka: stamped, bound and crumbling. Mukhanova, whom her employer described as ‘a typical bourgeois, always ill’, left her job in the Kremlin library in December 1933.95 But the file lay waiting, and in 1935 it was reopened. By then, Sergei Kirov had been murdered, a crime that seemed to prove how devious the regime’s foes could be. Though Kirov had been shot in Leningrad (a
nd his killer was almost certainly a man he had cuckolded96), Stalin responded by putting the Kremlin into lockdown. The cooks and cleaners had to enter through a different gate and follow new routes on their way to work.97 It was time, at last, to rid the place of every lurking enemy, and Stalin’s men knew just how to do that. Ezhov, who ran the campaign, made frequent private visits to Stalin’s Kremlin office in the Senate building all that spring, no doubt reporting on the tactics and the progress of it all.98 By April 1935, with some prompting from his inquisitors, even the women who mopped the Kremlin floors were calmly admitting that they knew of secret caches of strychnine and hidden guns.

  Several birds at once were lined up for the coming stone. As everybody knew, there were still staff in the Kremlin who had worked for the palace in the days of the last tsars. Such retainers, whose appointments owed nothing to the new regime, were no longer regarded as reliable. There were questions, too, about a large number of the rest. The police interrogators of 1935 found that many cleaners and maids had been recruited to the Kremlin in the 1920s through friends and family on the inside.99 The right security checks might have been made, but any small circle of friends was a spy-network in the making, a web of mutual loyalty and protection, owing nothing to the Boss, Stalin. There were also far too many Kremlin passes in circulation generally (another lapse for which the Kremlin commandant, Rudolf Peterson, was soon to pay). The fortress seemed to leak gossip.100 As Stalin read the file on his own staff, the list of reasons to get rid of the whole bunch ran on and on.

  In the spring of 1935, the questioning began in earnest. An issue that came up in nearly every file was Nadezhda’s death. A librarian may have heard that Stalin shot her or that she did not die in her sleep. A cleaner might have listened as a guard suggested that she killed herself, perhaps because she disagreed with her husband’s politics but maybe, too, because he beat and insulted her. As they drank their tea in steamy kitchens, some may have reasoned that there must be other plots, and that Nadezhda had simply been the first to die.101 Like most reports of NKVD interrogations, the records are replete with clues about the things that Soviet people were not supposed to be thinking or saying at the time. It was worth noting down, for instance, that a few Kremlin staff had been caught gossiping about the good life that most Europeans seemed to live. There had also been some overt talk (the truth, and therefore very dangerous) about a famine in Ukraine.102

  Abel Enukidze, ‘Uncle’ Abel, was a popular figure, and he was a favourite in the circle of Stalin’s own family. What emerged from the police reports on him was that he had become soft-hearted, and had offered jobs and small handouts when friends had found themselves in need. It was his doing, indeed, that so many figures from the intellectual and cosmopolitan opposition (the movement identified with Trotsky) had ended up working in the Kremlin library. Ezhov tarred Enukidze with corruption, a charge that could probably have been levelled at any officer of state with a budget to manage. Uncle or not, he lost his job in 1935, though he was left alive for two more years. Kamenev, meanwhile, could only watch in stupefaction as a cruel tale, fantastic and elaborate, was assembled around him. Mukhanova had been the first piece of the jigsaw, but in 1935 successive Kremlin hangers-on were questioned, usually over several days. A case was fabricated piece by piece, eventually forming Stalin’s desired picture of a Kremlin terrorist cell with links to Kamenev, his brother, and his wife. The plotters’ goal, of course, was nothing less than the murder of the Boss himself. The jigsaw was complete by the middle of 1935. It is said that Kamenev walked calmly down the Senate corridors to his final interview with Stalin. Zinoviev, however, reportedly collapsed on his way to the stifling Kremlin study and had to be carried between two of his guards.

  As the Kremlin affair of 1935 gathered pace, Rudolf Peterson, the citadel’s trusted commandant and holder of the Order of the Red Banner, tried to avert disaster by sending a statement to the police. As he explained, the summer of 1933 had been a time of frantic building work. His entire effort had been focused on completing the great hall of the Kremlin Palace in time for the Seventeenth Congress. Perhaps, then, he had not attended the right classes in Marxism-Leninism, and perhaps his men, working till the small hours and at weekends, had not made time to read the latest pamphlets either. Perhaps, too, he had avoided working with Finns, Estonians and Jews, but maybe he was wary of potential foreign networks and not simply an enemy of universal brotherhood. He had more trouble with tales of his drinking, and especially with reports that he had got so drunk at a party for the great hall’s completion that he had danced around in it, singing and kissing the builders, but even this would not have been a problem at another time. The entire staff enjoyed a drink, and men were often drunk at work.103 The point was that Peterson, like Enukidze, was a marked man: the Kremlin could not be purged unless his security regime could be shown to have failed. The police found all the evidence that they required.104 The new commandant, clearly, would have to be a ranking officer in the secret police, and he would also have to have a personal connection to Ezhov.

  The 1935 Kremlin affair eventually claimed 110 people. As staff in the fortress were later told – at a closed session chaired by Ezhov himself – ‘it was only thanks to Comrade Stalin that it was possible to uncover the hidden … nest of … scum’.105 The library in the Kremlin was closed, and several other facilities were shut down overnight. Among those left was the private hospital, located near the Kremlin on Vozdvizhenka street. Stalin was preoccupied with his own health. He was, in fact, as fascinated by research into longevity as he was haunted by the fear of enemies. He needed doctors, but he also mistrusted them, not least because he had a team of his own working to develop undetectable poisons in a secret toxicological laboratory behind the Lubyanka.106

  While Ezhov was getting rid of Enukidze and his men, therefore, another of Stalin’s aides, Karl Pauker, was sent to purge the Kremlin’s medical establishment.

  Pauker’s team reported a series of melodramatic discoveries. In the age of Agatha Christie, the Soviet secret police could write detective fiction with the best. Some of the lapses they claimed to have uncovered at the hospital could have been merely careless: bottles of pills had been mislabelled, quantities misread. A patient had been given caffeine instead of codeine. But when it was alleged that twelve cyanide capsules had disappeared, the sleuths knew that they had a case.107 In the hospital, as in the Kremlin itself, older staff and experts trained under the old regime came under scrutiny and were dismissed. In a series of charges that was to become standard in the years of the great purge, they were found to include former White-guardists, criminals, and foreign agents. One, unusually (the secret police were ever prudish in their use of terms), was declared to be a homosexual, a crime compounded by the discovery that he was also ‘very religious’ and often received visits from priests.108 The fear and the repression followed, and medicine, like engineering, agronomy, and most forms of historical research, became a potentially lethal vocation. But so was most security work. As Stalin’s aide, Pauker is said to have personally attended Zinoviev’s execution. He was himself shot soon after, perhaps because he felt secure enough to sneer as he delivered his report.109

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  The Kremlin, once a much-loved landmark, became an object of dread. ‘We were afraid to go near it,’ Muscovites repeat as they describe its place in their affections during Stalin’s rule. There were, of course, the state functions and formal banquets. Stalin is said to have made more welcome speeches to parties of shock-workers and hero-airmen in 1935 than in any other year before or after, but though the lights were bright and the food abundant, no-one warmed to the Kremlin itself.110 The few remaining residents seem to have disliked it. In the wake of the Kremlin affair, the number of elite politicians with Kremlin apartments shrank to less than a dozen. ‘It was dead,’ Sergo Mikoyan (the son of Stalin’s minister of foreign trade) explained. ‘Just stones.’ Stalin’s daughter, who lived in the Kremlin for twenty-five years, claimed that s
he ‘could not stand’ it.111 By the middle of the 1930s, the leader himself seldom spent a night there, preferring to sleep five miles away at the dacha that his architects had built for him after Nadezhda’s death. Even the citadel’s historic population of hooded crows was subjected to an inventive campaign of persecution by the Kremlin commandant, for Stalin could not tolerate the birds.112 The jolliest creature in the fortress was probably Bukharin’s fox, a former pet. Years after its master had been shot, Svetlana Allilueva remembered watching it playing hide and seek in the Tainitskie gardens, well out of sight of all the men in grey.113

  The security alone must have been stifling. The bodyguards stuck to their VIPs like ticks, and also kept tabs on them for Stalin’s police.114 Whenever several members of Stalin’s clique gathered at once, which happened almost every afternoon, the guards were multiplied, and on Thursdays, when the Politburo was scheduled to meet, the Kremlin as a whole was sealed. Svetlana Allilueva remembered the surreal processions that sometimes took place on the nights when her father wanted to watch a film after one of those meetings. In later life, Stalin occasionally convened the Politburo in the cinema itself, a space he had created in the former conservatory of the Grand Palace, but before 1939 there was still some semblance of collective government.115 The official business in the Senate building would end at nine or ten in the evening, and then the whole group would move off to watch their movie, crossing the cold deserted square to the palace with young Svetlana in the lead. The gates were locked, the walls bugged, and nothing could approach the Kremlin from outside without detection, but all the same the huddled band had to be followed by an armoured car, bumping around the dark buildings at walking pace.116