Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  “Couldn’t even shoot straight,” he quipped cruelly. “This was his military humour,” explains Svetlana. Yasha later divorced Zoya, and came home.18

  Stalin had high and, given his own meteoric success, unfair expectations of the sons—but he adored his daughter. In addition to these three, there was Artyom Sergeev, Stalin’s beloved adopted son, who was often in their house, even though his mother was still alive.4 Stalin was more indulgent than Nadya, even though he smacked Vasily “a couple of times.” Indeed, this woman portrayed as angelic in every history was, in her way, even more self-centred than Stalin. Her own family regarded her as “utterly self-indulgent,” recalls her nephew Vladimir Redens. “The nanny complained that Nadya was not remotely interested in the children.” Her daughter Svetlana agreed that she was much more committed to her studies. She treated the children sternly and never gave Svetlana a “word of praise.” It is surprising that she rowed most with Stalin not about his evil policies but about his spoiling the children!

  Yet it is harsh to blame her for this. Her medical report, preserved by Stalin in his archive, and the testimonies of those who knew her, confirm that Nadya suffered from a serious mental illness, perhaps hereditary manic depression or borderline personality disorder though her daughter called it “schizophrenia,” and a disease of the skull that gave her migraines. She needed special rest cures in 1922 and 1923 as she experienced “drowsiness and weakness.” She had had an abortion in 1926 which, her daughter revealed, had caused “female problems.” Afterwards she had no periods for months on end. In 1927, doctors discovered her heart had a defective valve—and she suffered from exhaustion, angina and arthritis. In 1930, the angina struck again. Her tonsils had recently been taken out. The trip to Carlsbad did not cure her mysterious headaches.

  She did not lack for medical care—the Bolsheviks were as obsessively hypochondriacal as they were fanatically political. Nadya was treated by the best doctors in Russia and Germany. But these were not psychiatrists: it is hard to imagine a worse environment for a fragile girl than the cruel aridity of this Kremlin pressure cooker pervaded by the martial Bolshevism that she so worshipped—and the angry thoughtlessness of Stalin, whom she so revered.

  She was married to a demanding egotist incapable of giving her, or probably anyone, happiness: his relentless energy seemed to suck her dry. But she was also patently the wrong person for him. She did not soothe his stress—she added to it. He admitted he was baffled by Nadya’s mental crises. He simply did not possess the emotional resources to help her. Sometimes her “schizophrenia” was so grievous, “she was almost deranged.” The magnates, and the Alliluyevs themselves, sympathized with Stalin. Yet, despite their turbulent marriage and their strange similarity of passion and jealousy, they loved each other after their own fashion.

  After all, it was Stalin for whom Nadya was dressing up. The “black dress with rose pattern appliqué . . .” had been bought as a present for her by her brother, slim brown-eyed Pavel Alliluyev who had just returned with his usual treasure chest of gifts from Berlin, where he worked for the Red Army. With Nadya’s proud Gypsy, Georgian, Russian and German blood, the rose looked striking against her jet-black hair. Stalin would be surprised because, as her nephew put it, he “never encouraged her to dress more glamorously.”19

  The drinking at dinner was heavy, regulated by a tamada (Georgian toastmaster). This was probably one of the Georgians such as the flamboyant Grigory Ordzhonikidze, always known as “Sergo,” who resembled “a Georgian prince” with his mane of long hair and leonine face. Some time during the evening, without any of the other revellers noticing, Stalin and Nadya became angry with one another. This was hardly a rare occurrence. Her evening began to crumble when, among all the toasts, dancing and flirting at table, Stalin barely noticed how she had dressed up, even though she was one of the youngest women present. This was certainly ill-mannered but not uncommon in many marriages.

  They were surrounded by the other Bolshevik magnates, all hardened by years in the underground, blood-spattered by their exploits in the Civil War, and now exultant if battered by the industrial triumphs and rural struggles of the Stalin Revolution. Some, like Stalin, were in their fifties. But most were strapping, energetic fanatics in their late thirties, some of the most dynamic administrators the world has ever seen, capable of building towns and factories against all odds, but also of slaughtering their enemies and waging war on their own peasants. In their tunics and boots, they were macho, hard-drinking, powerful and famous across the Imperium, stars with blazing egos, colossal responsibilities, and Mausers in their holsters. The boisterous, booming and handsome Jewish cobbler, Lazar Kaganovich, Stalin’s deputy, had just returned from presiding over mass executions and deportations in the North Caucasus. Then there was the swaggering Cossack commander Budyonny with his luxuriant walrus moustaches and dazzling white teeth, and the slim, shrewd and dapper Armenian Mikoyan, all veterans of brutal expeditions to raise grain and crush the peasants. These were voluble, violent and colourful political showmen.

  They were an incestuous family, a web of long friendships and enduring hatreds, shared love affairs, Siberian exiles and Civil War exploits: Mikhail Kalinin, the President, had been visiting the Alliluyevs since 1900. Nadya knew Voroshilov’s wife from Tsaritsyn (later Stalingrad) and she studied at the Industrial Academy with Maria Kaganovich and Dora Khazan (wife of another magnate, Andreyev, also present), her best friends along with Polina Molotova. Finally there was the small intellectual Nikolai Bukharin, all twinkling eyes and reddish beard, a painter, poet and philosopher whom Lenin had once called the “darling of the Party” and who had been Stalin and Nadya’s closest friend. He was a charmer, the Puck of the Bolsheviks. Stalin had defeated him in 1929 but he remained friends with Nadya. Stalin himself half loved and half hated “Bukharchik” in that deadly combination of admiration and envy that was habitual to him. That night, Bukharin was readmitted, at least temporarily, to the magic circle.

  Irritated by Stalin’s lack of attention, Nadya started dancing with her louche, sandy-haired Georgian godfather, “Uncle Abel” Yenukidze, the official in charge of the Kremlin who was already shocking the Party with his affairs with teenage ballerinas. “Uncle Abel’s” fate would illustrate the deadly snares of hedonism when private life belonged to the Party. Perhaps Nadya was trying to make Stalin angry. Natalya Rykova, who was in the Kremlin that night with her father, the former Premier, but not at the dinner, heard the next day that Nadya’s dancing infuriated Stalin. The story is certainly credible because other accounts mention her flirting with someone. Perhaps Stalin was so drunk, he did not even notice.

  Stalin was busy with his own flirtation. Even though Nadya was opposite him, he flirted shamelessly with the “beautiful” wife of Alexander Yegorov, a Red Army commander with whom he had served in the Polish War of 1920. Galina Yegorova, née Zekrovskaya, thirty-four, was a brash film actress, a “pretty, interesting and charming” brunette well known for her affairs and risqué dresses. Among those drab Bolshevik matrons, Yegorova must have been like a peacock in a farmyard for, as she herself admitted in her later interrogation, she moved in a world of “dazzling company, stylish clothes . . . flirtatiousness, dancing and fun.” Stalin’s style of flirting alternated between traditional Georgian chivalry and, when drunk, puerile boorishness. On this occasion, the latter triumphed. Stalin always entertained children by throwing biscuits, orange peel and bits of bread into plates of ice cream or cups of tea. He flirted with the actress in the same way, lobbing breadballs at her. His courtship of Yegorova made Nadya manically jealous: she could not tolerate it.

  Stalin was no womanizer: he was married to Bolshevism and emotionally committed to his own drama in the cause of Revolution. Any private emotions were bagatelles compared to the betterment of mankind through Marxism-Leninism. But even if they were low on his list of priorities, even if he was emotionally damaged, he was not uninterested in women—and women were definitely interested in him, even “e
namoured,” according to Molotov. One of his entourage later said that Stalin complained that the Alliluyev women “would not leave him alone” because “they all wanted to go to bed with him.” There was some truth in this.

  Whether they were the wives of comrades, relations or servants, women buzzed around him like amorous bees. His newly opened archives reveal how he was bombarded with fan letters not unlike those received by modern pop stars. “Dear Comrade Stalin . . . I saw you in my dreams . . . I have hopes of an audience . . .” writes a provincial teacher, adding hopefully like a starry-eyed groupie: “I enclose my photograph . . .”

  Stalin replied playfully if negatively: “Comrade Unfamiliar! I ask you to trust that I have no wish to disappoint you and I’m ready to respect your letter but I have to say I have no appointment (no time!) to satisfy your wish. I wish you all the best. J Stalin. PS Your letter and photograph returned.” But sometimes he must have told Poskrebyshev that he would be happy to meet his admirers. This gels with the story of Ekaterina Mikulina, an attractive, ambitious girl of twenty-three who wrote a treatise, “Socialist Competition of Working People,” which she sent to Stalin, admitting it was full of mistakes and asking for his help. He invited her to visit him on 10 May 1929. He liked her and it was said she stayed the night at the dacha in Nadya’s absence.5 She received no benefits from this short liaison other than the honour of his writing her preface.

  Certainly Nadya, who knew him best, suspected him of having affairs and she had every reason to know. His bodyguard Vlasik confirmed to his daughter that Stalin was so besieged with offers that he could not resist everyone: “he was a man after all,” behaving with the seigneurial sensuality of a traditional Georgian husband. Nadya’s jealousy was sometimes manic, sometimes indulgent: in her letters, she lovingly teased him about his female admirers as if she was proud of being married to such a great man. But at the theatre, she had recently ruined the evening by throwing a tantrum when he flirted with a ballerina. Most recently, there was the female hairdresser in the Kremlin with whom Stalin was evidently conducting some sort of dalliance. If he had merely visited the barber’s shop like the other leaders, this anonymous girl would not have become such an issue. Yet Molotov remembered the hairdresser fifty years later.

  Stalin had had his share of affairs within the Party. His relationships were as short as his spells in exile. Most of the girlfriends were fellow revolutionaries or their wives. Molotov was impressed by Stalin’s “success” with women: when, just before the Revolution, Stalin stole a girlfriend named Marusya from Molotov, the latter put it down to his “beautiful dark brown eyes,” though luring a girlfriend away from this plodder hardly qualifies Stalin as a Casanova. Kaganovich confirmed that Stalin enjoyed affairs with several comrades including the “plump, pretty” Ludmilla Stal.6 One source mentions an earlier affair with Nadya’s friend Dora Khazan. Stalin may have benefited from revolutionary sexual freedom, even, in his diffident way, enjoying some success with the girls who worked on the Central Committee secretariat, but he remained a traditional Caucasian. He favoured liaisons with discreet GPU staff: the hairdresser fitted the bill.

  As so often with jealousy, Nadya’s manic tantrums and bouts of depression encouraged the very thing she dreaded. All of these things— her illness, disappointment about her dress, politics, jealousy and Stalin’s oafishness—came together that night.20

  Stalin was unbearably rude to Nadya but historians, in their determination to show his monstrosity, have ignored how unbearably rude she was to him. This “peppery woman,” as Stalin’s security chief, Pauker, described her, frequently shouted at Stalin in public, which was why her own mother thought her a “fool.” The cavalryman Budyonny, who was at the dinner, remembered how she was “always nagging and humiliating” Stalin. “I don’t know how he puts up with it,” Budyonny confided in his wife. By now her depression had become so bad that she confided in a friend that she was sick of “everything, even the children.”

  The lack of interest of a mother in her own children is a flashing danger signal if ever there was one, but there was no one to act on it. Stalin was not the only one puzzled by her. Few of this rough-hewn circle, including Party women like Polina Molotova, understood that Nadya was probably suffering from clinical depression: “she couldn’t control herself,” said Molotov. She desperately needed sympathy. Polina Molotova admitted the Vozhd was “rough” with Nadya. Their roller coaster continued. One moment she was leaving Stalin, the next they loved each other again.

  At the dinner, some accounts claim, it was a political toast that inflamed her. Stalin toasted the destruction of the Enemies of the State and noticed Nadya had not raised her glass.

  “Why aren’t you drinking?” he called over truculently, aware that she and Bukharin shared a disapproval of his starvation of the peasantry. She ignored him. To get her attention, Stalin tossed orange peel and flicked cigarettes at her, but this outraged her. When she became angrier and angrier, he called over, “Hey you! Have a drink!”

  “My name isn’t ‘hey’!” she retorted. Furiously rising from the table, she stormed out. It was probably now that Budyonny heard her shout at Stalin: “Shut up! Shut up!”

  Stalin shook his head in the ensuing silence: “What a fool!” he muttered, boozily not understanding how upset she was. Budyonny must have been one of the many there who sympathized with Stalin.

  “I wouldn’t let my wife talk to me like that!” declared the Cossack bravo who may not have been the best adviser since his own first wife had committed suicide or at least died accidentally while playing with his pistol.21

  Someone had to follow her out. She was the leader’s wife so the deputy leader’s wife had to look after her. Polina Molotova pulled on her coat and followed Nadya outside. They walked round and round the Kremlin, as others were to do in times of crisis.

  Nadya complained to Polina, “He grumbles all the time . . . and why did he have to flirt like that?” She talked about the “business with the hairdresser” and Yegorova at the dinner. The women decided, as women do, that he was drunk, playing the fool. But Polina, devoted to the Party, also criticized her friend, saying “it was wrong of her to abandon Stalin at such a difficult time.” Perhaps Polina’s “ Partiinost”—Party-mindedness—made Nadya feel even more isolated.

  “She quietened down,” recalled Polina, “and talked about the Academy and her chances of starting work . . . When she seemed perfectly calm,” in the early hours, they said goodnight. She left Nadya at the Poteshny Palace and crossed the lane, home to the Horse Guards.

  Nadya went to her room, dropping the tea rose from her hair at the door. The dining room, with a special table for Stalin’s array of government telephones, was the main room there. Two halls led off it. To the right was Stalin’s office and small bedroom where he slept either on a military cot or a divan, the habits of an itinerant revolutionary. Stalin’s late hours and Nadya’s strict attendance at the Academy meant they had separate rooms. Carolina Til, the housekeeper, the nannies and the servants were further down this corridor. The left corridor led to Nadya’s tiny bedroom where the bed was draped in her favourite shawls. The windows opened onto the fragrant roses of the Alexandrovsky Gardens.

  Stalin’s movements in the next two hours are a mystery: did he return home? The party continued chez Voroshilov. But the bodyguard Vlasik told Khrushchev (who was not at the dinner) that Stalin left for a rendezvous at his Zubalovo dacha with a woman named Guseva, the wife of an officer, described by Mikoyan, who appreciated feminine aesthetics, as “very beautiful.” Some of these country houses were just fifteen minutes’ drive from the Kremlin. If he did go, it is possible he took some boon companions with him when the women went to bed. Voroshilov’s wife was famously jealous of her husband. Molotov and President Kalinin, an old roué, were mentioned afterwards to Bukharin by Stalin himself. Certainly Vlasik would have gone with Stalin in the car. When Stalin did not come home, Nadya is said to have called the dacha.

  “Is Stal
in there?”

  “Yes,” replied an “inexperienced fool” of a security guard.

  “Who’s with him?”

  “Gusev’s wife.”

  This version may explain Nadya’s sudden desperation. However, a resurgence of her migraine, a wave of depression or just the sepulchral solitude of Stalin’s grim apartment in the early hours are also feasible. There are holes in the story too: Molotov, the nanny, and Stalin’s granddaughter, among others, insisted that Stalin slept at home in the apartment. Stalin certainly would not have entertained women in his Zubalovo dacha, because we know his children were there. But there were plenty of other dachas. More importantly, no one has managed to identify this Guseva, though there were several army officers of that name. Moreover Mikoyan never mentioned this to his children or in his own memoirs. Prim Molotov may have been protecting Stalin in his conversations in old age—he lied about many other matters, as did Khrushchev, dictating his reminiscences in his dotage. It seems more likely that if this woman was the “beautiful” wife of a soldier, it was Yegorova who was actually at the party and whose flirting caused the row in the first place.

  We will never know the truth but there is no contradiction between these accounts: Stalin probably did go drinking at a dacha with some fellow carousers, maybe Yegorova, and he certainly returned to the apartment in the early hours. The fates of these magnates and their women would soon depend on their relationship with Stalin. Many of them would die terrible deaths within five years. Stalin never forgot the part they each played that November night.