Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  “Good that Kirov visited you,” she wrote back, sweetly, to her husband who had once saved her life in the water. “You must be careful swimming.” Later he had a special paddling pool built inside the house at Sochi, to precisely his height, so he could cool off in private.

  Meanwhile the famine was gaining momentum: Voroshilov wrote to Stalin, encouraging the despatch of leaders into the regions to see what was happening.

  “You’re right,” Stalin agreed on 24 September 1931. “We don’t always understand the meaning of personal trips and personal acquaintance of people with affairs. We’d win a lot more often if we travelled more and got to know people. I didn’t want to go on holiday but . . . was very tired and my health’s improving . . .” He was not the only one on holiday while discussing the famine: Budyonny reported starvation but concluded, “The building on my new country house is finished, it’s very pretty...”27

  “It’s raining endlessly in Moscow,” Nadya informed Stalin. “The children have already had flu. I protect myself by wrapping up warmly.” Then she teased him playfully about a defector’s book about Lenin and Stalin. “I read the White journals. There’s interesting material about you. Are you curious? I asked Dvinsky [Poskrebyshev’s deputy] to find it . . . Sergo phoned and complained about his pneumonia . . .”

  There was a fearsome storm in Sochi: “The gale howled for two days with the fury of an enraged beast,” wrote Stalin. “Eighteen large oaks uprooted in the grounds of our dacha . . .” He was happy to receive the children’s letters. “Kiss them from me, they’re good children.”

  Svetlana’s note to her “First Secretary” commanded: “Hello Papochka. Come home quickly—it’s an order!” Stalin obeyed. The crisis was worsening.28

  6

  Trains Full of Corpses: Love, Death and Hysteria

  The peasants ate dogs, horses, rotten potatoes, the bark of trees, anything they could find,” observed one witness, Fedor Belov, while, on 21 December 1931, in the midst of this crisis, Stalin celebrated his birthday at Zubalovo. “I remember visiting that house with Kliment on birthdays and recall the hospitality of Joseph Vissarionovich. Songs, dances, yes, yes, dances. All were dancing as they could!” wrote the diarist Ekaterina Voroshilova, Jewish wife of the Defence Commissar, herself a revolutionary, once Yenukidze’s mistress and now a fattening housewife. First they sang: Voroshilova recalled how they performed operatic arias, peasant romances, Georgian laments, Cossack ballads—and, surprisingly for these godless ruffians, hymns, learned in village churches and seminaries.

  Sometimes they forgot the ladies and burst into bawdy songs too. Voroshilov and Stalin, both ex-choirboys, sang together: Stalin “had a good tenor voice and he loved songs and music,” she writes. “He had his favourite arias”—he particularly liked old Georgian melodies, arias from Rigoletto, and he always wanted to hear the hymn from the Orthodox liturgy, Mnogaya leta. He later told President Truman, “Music’s an excellent thing, it reduces the beast in men,” a subject on which he was surely something of an expert. Stalin’s pitch was perfect: it was a “rare” and “sweet” voice. Indeed, one of his lieutenants said Stalin was good enough to have become a professional singer, a mind-boggling historical possibility.

  Stalin presided over the American gramophone—he “changed the discs and entertained the guests—he loved the funny ones.” Molotov was “dancing the Russian way with a handkerchief ” with Polina in the formal style of someone who had learned ballroom dancing. The Caucasians dominated the dancing. As Voroshilova describes it, Anastas Mikoyan danced up to Nadya Stalin. This Armenian who had studied for the priesthood like Stalin himself, was slim, circumspect, wily and industrious, with black hair, moustache and flashing eyes, a broken aquiline nose and a taste for immaculate clothes that, even when clad in his usual tunic and boots, lent him the air of a lithe dandy. Highly intelligent with the driest of wits, he had a gift for languages, understanding English, and in 1931, he taught himself German by translating Das Kapital.

  Mikoyan was not afraid to contradict Stalin yet became the great survivor of Soviet history, still at the top in Brezhnev’s time. A Bolshevik since 1915, he had proven his ruthless competence in the Caucasus during the Civil War. He was captured with the famous Twenty-Six Commissars—yet typically he alone survived. They were all shot. He was now the overlord of trade and supply.39 Svetlana, Stalin’s daughter, thought him the most attractive of the magnates, “youthful and dashing.” He was certainly the finest dancer and sharpest dresser. “One was never bored with Mikoyan,” says Artyom. “He’s our cavalier,” declared Khrushchev. “At least he’s the best we’ve got!” But he warned against trusting that “shrewd fox from the east.”

  Though devoted to his modest, cosy wife Ashken, Mikoyan, perhaps trying to include Nadya in the festivities, “for a long time scraped his feet before Nadezhda Sergeevna, asking her to dance the lezginka [a traditional Caucasian dance that she knew well] with him. He danced in very quick time, stretching up as if taller and thinner.” But Nadya was “so shy and bashful” at this Armenian chivalry that she “covered her face with her hands and, as if unable to react to this sweet and artistic dance, she slipped from his energetic approaches.” Perhaps she was aware of Stalin’s jealousy.

  Voroshilov was as light-footed a tripper on the dance floor as he was a graceless blunderer on the political stage. He danced the gopak and then asked for partners for what his wife called “his star turn, the polka.” It was no wonder that the atmosphere among the magnates was so febrile. In the countryside, the regime itself seemed to be tottering. 1

  By the summer, when Fred Beal, an American radical, visited a village near Kharkov, then capital of Ukraine, he found the inhabitants dead except one insane woman. Rats feasted in huts that had become charnel houses.

  On 6 June 1932, Stalin and Molotov declared that “no matter of deviation—regarding either amounts or deadlines set for grain deliveries—can be permitted.” On 17 June, the Ukrainian Politburo, led by Vlas Chubar and Stanislas Kosior, begged for food assistance as the regions were in “a state of emergency.” Stalin blamed Chubar and Kosior themselves, combined with “wrecking” by enemies—the famine itself was merely a hostile act against the Central Committee, hence himself. “The Ukraine,” he wrote to Kaganovich, “has been given more than it should get.” When an official bravely reported the famine to the Politburo, Stalin interrupted: “They tell us, Comrade Terekhov, that you’re a good orator, but it transpires that you’re a good story-teller. Fabricating such a fairy tale about famine! Thought you’d scare us but it won’t work. Wouldn’t it be better for you to leave the post of . . . Ukrainian CC Secretary and join the Writers’ Union: you’ll concoct fables, and fools will read them.” Mikoyan was visited by a Ukrainian who asked, “Does Comrade Stalin—for that matter does anyone in the Politburo—know what is happening in Ukraine? Well if not, I’ll give you some idea. A train recently pulled into Kiev loaded with corpses of people who had starved to death. It had picked up corpses all the way from Poltava . . .”

  The magnates knew exactly what was happening:40 their letters show how they spotted terrible things from their luxury trains. Budyonny told Stalin from Sochi, where he was on holiday, “Looking at people from the windows of the train, I see very tired people in old worn clothes, our horses are skin and bone . . .” President Kalinin, Stalin’s anodyne “village elder,” sneered at the “political impostors” asking “contributions for ‘starving’ Ukraine. Only degraded disintegrating classes can produce such cynical elements.” Yet on 18 June 1932, Stalin admitted to Kaganovich what he called the “glaring absurdities” of “famine” in Ukraine.

  The death toll of this “absurd” famine, which only occurred to raise money to build pig-iron smelters and tractors, was between four to five and as high as ten million dead, a tragedy unequalled in human history except by the Nazi and Maoist terrors. The peasants had always been the Bolshevik Enemy. Lenin himself had said: “The peasant must do a bit of starving.” Kopelev ad
mitted “with the rest of my generation, I firmly believed the ends justified the means. I saw people dying from hunger.” “They deny responsibility for what happened later,” wrote Nadezhda Mandelstam, wife of the poet, in her classic memoir, Hope Abandoned. “But how can they? It was, after all, these people of the Twenties who demolished the old values and invented the formulas . . . to justify the unprecedented experiment: You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. Every new killing was excused on the grounds we were building a remarkable ‘new’ world.” The slaughter and famine strained the Party but its members barely winced: how did they tolerate death on such a vast scale?

  “A revolution without firing squads,” Lenin is meant to have said, “is meaningless.” He spent his career praising the Terror of the French Revolution because his Bolshevism was a unique creed, “a social system based on blood-letting.” The Bolsheviks were atheists but they were hardly secular politicians in the conventional sense: they stooped to kill from the smugness of the highest moral eminence. Bolshevism may not have been a religion, but it was close enough. Stalin told Beria the Bolsheviks were “a sort of military-religious order.” When Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Cheka, died, Stalin called him “a devout knight of the proletariat.” Stalin’s “order of sword-bearers” resembled the Knights Templars, or even the theocracy of the Iranian Ayatollahs, more than any traditional secular movement. They would die and kill for their faith in the inevitable progress towards human betterment, making sacrifices of their own families, with a fervour seen only in the religious slaughters and martyrdoms of the Middle Ages—and the Middle East.

  They regarded themselves as special “noble-blooded” people. When Stalin asked General Zhukov if the capital might fall in 1941, he said, “Can we hold Moscow, tell me as a Bolshevik?” just as an eighteenth-century Englishman might say, “Tell me as a gentleman!”

  The “sword-bearers” had to believe with Messianic faith, in order to act with the correct ruthlessness, and to convince others they were right to do so. Stalin’s “quasi-Islamic” fanaticism was typical of the Bolshevik magnates: Mikoyan’s son called his father “a Bolshevik fanatic.” Most41 came from devoutly religious backgrounds. They hated Judaeo-Christianity— but the orthodoxy of their parents was replaced by something even more rigid, a systematic amorality: “This religion—or science, as it was modestly called by its adepts—invests man with a godlike authority . . . In the Twenties, a good many people drew a parallel to the victory of Christianity and thought this new religion would last a thousand years,” wrote Nadezhda Mandelstam. “All were agreed on the superiority of the new creed that promised heaven on earth instead of other worldly rewards.”

  The Party justified its “dictatorship” through purity of faith. Their Scriptures were the teachings of Marxism-Leninism, regarded as a “scientific” truth. Since ideology was so important, every leader had to be—or seem to be—an expert on Marxism-Leninism, so that these ruffians spent their weary nights studying, to improve their esoteric credentials, dreary articles on dialectical materialism. It was so important that Molotov and Polina even discussed Marxism in their love letters: “Polichka my darling . . . reading Marxist classics is very necessary . . . You must read some more of Lenin’s works coming out soon and then a number of Stalin’s . . . I so want to see you.”

  “Party-mindedness” was “an almost mystical concept,” explained Kopelev. “The indispensable prerequisites were iron discipline and faithful observance of all the rituals of Party life.” As one veteran Communist put it, a Bolshevik was not someone who believed merely in Marxism but “someone who had absolute faith in the Party no matter what . . . A person with the ability to adapt his morality and conscience in such a way that he can unreservedly accept the dogma that the Party is never wrong—even though it’s wrong all the time.” Stalin did not exaggerate when he boasted: “We Bolsheviks are people of a special cut.”2

  Nadya was not of “a special cut.” The famine fed the tensions in Stalin’s marriage. When little Kira Alliluyeva visited her uncle Redens, GPU chief in Kharkov, she opened the blinds of her special train and saw, to her amazement, starving people with swollen bellies, begging to the train for food, and starving dogs running alongside. Kira told her mother, Zhenya, who fearlessly informed Stalin.

  “Don’t pay any attention,” he replied. “She’s a child and makes things up.”42 In the last year of Stalin’s marriage, we find fragments of both happiness and misery. In February 1932, it was Svetlana’s birthday: she starred in a play for her parents and the Politburo. The two boys, Vasya and Artyom, recited verses.3

  “Things here seem to be all right, we’re all very well. The children are growing up, Vasya is ten now and Svetlana five . . . She and her father are great friends . . .” Nadya wrote to Stalin’s mother Keke in Tiflis. It was hardly an occasion to confide great secrets but the tone is interesting. “Altogether we have terribly little free time, Joseph and I. You’ve probably heard that I’ve gone back to school in my old age. I don’t find studying difficult in itself. But it’s pretty difficult trying to fit it in with my duties at home in the course of the day. Still, I’m not complaining and so far, I’m coping with it all quite successfully . . .” She was finding it hard to cope.

  Stalin’s own nerves were strained to the limit but he remained jealous of her: he felt old friends Yenukidze and Bukharin were undermining him with Nadya. Bukharin visited Zubalovo, strolling the gardens with her. Stalin was working but returned and crept up on them in the garden, leaping out to shout at Bukharin: “I’ll kill you!” Bukharin naïvely regarded this as an Asiatic joke.

  When Bukharin married a teenage beauty, Anna Larina, another child of a Bolshevik family, Stalin tipsily telephoned him during the night: “Nikolai, I congratulate you. You outspit me this time too!” Bukharin asked how. “A good wife, a beautiful wife . . . younger than my Nadya!”4

  At home, Stalin alternated between absentee bully and hectored husband. Nadya had in the past snitched on dissenters at the Academy: in these last months, it is hard to tell if she was denouncing Enemies or riling Stalin who ordered their arrest. There is the story of this “peppery woman” shouting at him: “You’re a tormentor, that’s what you are! You torment your own son, your wife, the whole Russian people.” When Stalin discussed the importance of the Party above family, Yenukidze replied: “What about your children?” Stalin shouted, “They’re HERS!” pointing at Nadya, who ran out crying.

  Nadya was becoming ever more hysterical, or as Molotov put it, “unbalanced.” Sergo’s daughter Eteri, who had every reason to hate Stalin, explains, “Stalin didn’t treat her well but she, like all the Alliluyevs, was very unstable.” She seemed to become estranged from the children and everything else. Stalin confided in Khrushchev that he sometimes locked himself in the bathroom, while she beat on the door, shouting: “You’re an impossible man. It’s impossible to live with you!”

  This image of Stalin as the powerless henpecked husband besieged, cowering in his own bathroom by the wild-eyed Nadya, must rank as the most incongruous vision of the Man of Steel in his entire career. Himself frantic, with his mission in jeopardy, Stalin was baffled by Nadya’s mania. She told a friend that “everything bored her—she was sick of everything.”

  “What about the children?” asked the friend.

  “Everything, even the children.” This gives some idea of the difficulties Stalin faced. Nadya’s state of mind sounds more like a psychological illness than despair caused by political protest or even her oafish husband. “She had attacks of melancholy,” Zhenya told Stalin; she was “sick.” The doctors prescribed “caffeine” to pep her up. Stalin later blamed the caffeine and he was right: caffeine would have disastrously exacerbated her despair.5

  Stalin became hysterical himself, feeling the vast Ukrainian steppes slipping out of his control: “It seems that in some regions of Ukraine, Soviet power has ceased to exist,” Stalin scribbled to Kosior, Politburo member and Ukrainian boss. “Is this true? Is the s
ituation so bad in Ukrainian villages? What’s the GPU doing? Maybe you’ll check this problem and take measures.”6 The magnates again roamed the heartland to raise grain, more ferocious semi-military expeditions with OGPU troops and Party officials wearing pistols—Molotov headed to the Urals, the Lower Volga and Siberia. While he was there, the wheels of his car became stuck in a muddy rut and the car rolled over into a ditch. No one was hurt but Molotov claimed, “An attempt was made on my life.”7

  Stalin sensed the doubts of the local bosses, making him more aware than ever that he needed a new, tougher breed of lieutenant like Beria whom he promoted to rule the Caucasus. Summoning the Georgian bosses to Moscow, Stalin turned viciously against the Old Bolshevik “chieftains”: “I’ve got the impression that there’s no Party organization in Transcaucasia at all. There’s just the rule of chieftains—voting for whomsoever they drink wine with . . . It’s a total joke . . . We need to promote men who work honestly . . . Whenever we send anyone down there, they become chieftains too!” He was playing to the gallery. Everyone laughed, but then he turned serious: “We’ll smash all their bones if this rule of chieftains isn’t liquidated . . .”

  Sergo was away.

  “Where is he?” whispered one of the officials to Mikoyan who answered: “Why should Sergo participate in Beria’s coronation? He knows him well enough.”

  There was open opposition to the promotion of Beria: the local chiefs had almost managed to have him removed to a provincial backwater but Stalin had saved him. Then Stalin defined the essence of Beria’s career: “He solves problems while the Buro just pushes paper!”43

  “It’s not going to work, Comrade Stalin. We can’t work together,” replied one Georgian.

  “I can’t work with that charlatan!” said another.