Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  Svetlana lost another part of her support system: Carolina Til, the dependable housekeeper, that cosy link to her mother, was sacked in the purge of Germans. Beria found her replacement in a niece of his wife Nina from Georgia—though as ever, his true motives are unclear. Svetlana’s new governess was Alexandra Nakashidze, tall, slim, long-legged, with perfect pale skin and long thick blue-black hair. A naïve and poorly educated girl from a Georgian village, this NKVD lieutenant entered this increasingly monocoloured world like a purple-feathered peacock. The Alliluyev and Mikoyan boys are still struck by her today.

  Svetlana resented her so-called governess. Nakashidze’s arrival shows Beria’s special role in the family: could she be his spy in Stalin’s household that was otherwise controlled by Vlasik? We know that the court encouraged Stalin to remarry: was she there for Stalin?1426 However, there was a more obvious candidate almost within the family.

  Zhenya Alliluyeva was a widow but she was convinced her husband had been murdered by Beria. Was she guilty about her relationship with Stalin? There is no evidence of this. Her husband had surely known (or chosen not to know) what was going on, but the relationship with Stalin, such as it was, had already cooled by 1938. But now Stalin missed her and made a strange, indirect proposal to her. Beria came to see Zhenya and said: “You’re such a nice person, and you’re so fine looking, do you want to move in and be housekeeper at Stalin’s house?” Usually this is interpreted as a mysterious threat from Beria but it is surely unlikely that he would have made such a proposal without Stalin’s permission, especially since she could have phoned him to discuss it. In Stalin’s mind, a “housekeeper” was his ideal baba, the khozyaika. This was surely a semi–marriage proposal, an awkward attempt to salvage the warmth of the old days from the destruction that he himself had unleashed. It was unforgivably clumsy to send Beria, whom Zhenya loathed, on this sensitive mission but that is typical of Stalin. If one has any doubt about this analysis, Stalin’s reaction to Zhenya’s next move may confirm it.

  Zhenya was alarmed, fearing that Beria would frame her for trying to poison Stalin. She swiftly married an old friend, named N. V. Molochnikov, a Jewish engineer whom she had met in Germany, perhaps the lover who had almost broken up her marriage. Stalin was appalled, claiming that it was indecent so soon after Pavel’s death. Beria’s proposal puts Stalin’s hurt in a slightly different light. Beria fanned the flames by suggesting that perhaps Zhenya had poisoned her husband, an idea with resonance in this poisoners’ coven. Some say the body was dug up twice for tests. In spite of the poisoning allegations, Stalin retained his fascination with Zhenya, going out of his way just before the war to quiz her daughter Kira: “How’s your mother?” Zhenya and Anna Redens were banned from the Kremlin and Stalin looked elsewhere for his “housekeeper.”7

  A young maid named Valentina Vasilevna Istomina had worked at Zubalovo since her late teens in the early thirties. In 1938, she came to work at Kuntsevo. Stalin was attracted to a specific ideal: the busty, blue-eyed, big-haired and retroussé-nosed Russian peasant woman, submissive and practical, a baba who could make a home without in any way becoming involved in his other life. Zhenya had the looks but there was nothing submissive about her. He also found the same looks coupled with haughtiness in the top artistes of the time. Stalin was an avid attender of the theatre, opera and ballet, regularly visiting the Politburo (formerly imperial) loge in the Bolshoi or the Moscow Arts Theatre. His favourite singers were the soprano Natalya Schpiller, who was a blue-eyed Valkyrie, and the mezzo Vera Davydova. He liked to instruct them “in a fatherly way” but he also played one off against the other. He acted being in love with Davydova who later boasted that he proposed marriage: if so, it was only a joke. He teased her by suggesting that she improve her singing by copying Schpiller. When Davydova appeared in a glittery belt, he told her, “Look, Schpiller’s a beguiling woman too but she dresses modestly for official receptions.”8

  These divas were much too glamorous for Stalin but there was no shortage of available admirers, as Vlasik told his daughter. There are many stories of women invited to Kuntsevo: Mirtskhulava, a young Georgian official, remembers Stalin at a Kremlin dinner in 1938 sending him to ask a girl in his Komsomol delegation if she was the daughter of some Old Bolshevik, then inviting her to the dacha. Stalin insisted Mirtskhulava ask her secretly, without either the knowledge of the magnates at his table or of the Georgians. The same happened with a beautiful Georgian pilot whom he met at the Tushino air show in 1938 and who regularly visited Stalin.

  This was probably the pattern of his trivial dalliances but what happened at Kuntsevo is beyond our knowledge. Everyone who knew Stalin insists that he was no womanizer and he was famously inhibited about his body. We know nothing about his sexual tastes but Nadya’s letters suggest they had a passionate relationship. A fascinating glimpse into his relations with women—perhaps connected to his views on sex—is provided by his attitude to dancing. He liked making Russian dance steps and kicks on his own but dancing à deux made him nervous. He told the tenor Kozlovsky at a party that he would not dance because he had damaged his arm in exile and so “could not hold a woman by the waist.”

  Stalin warned his son Vasily against “women with ideas,” whom he found uncomfortable: “we’ve known that kind, herrings with ideas, skin and bones.” He was most at home with the women of the service staff. The maids, cooks and guards at his houses were all employed by Vlasik’s department and all signed confidentiality contracts though these were hardly necessary in this kingdom of fear. Even when the USSR collapsed, very few of them ever spoke.143 The Kremlin hairdresser, who so upset Nadya, was one of these and so was his maid Valentina Istomina, known as Valechka, who gradually became the mainstay of Stalin’s home life.

  “She laughed all the time and we really liked her,” said Svetlana, “she was very young, with pink cheeks and she was liked by everyone. She was a pleasant figure, typically Russian.” She was Stalin’s “ideal” woman, buxom and neat, “round-faced and pug-nosed,” primitive, simple and unlettered; she “served at table deftly, never joined in the conversation,” yet she was always there when she was needed. “She had light brown mousy hair—I remember her well from about 1936, nothing special, not fat not thin but very friendly and smiling,” says Artyom Sergeev. Out of Stalin’s presence, she was fun in an unthreatening way, even shrewd: “She was a clever one, talkative, a chatterbox,” recalled one of Stalin’s bodyguards.

  Valechka was promoted to housekeeper, taking care of Stalin’s “clothes, the food, the house and so on and she travelled with him wherever he went. She was a comfortable soul to be quiet with, yet he trusted her and she was devoted to him.” Stalin was farcically proud of the way she prepared his underwear: after the war, one Georgian official was amazed when he showed off the piles of gleaming white smalls in his wardrobe, surely a unique moment in the history of dictators.

  At the Kremlin apartment, Valechka often served Svetlana and her friend Martha who recalls her “in her white apron, like a kind woman from the villages, with her fair hair and shapeless figure, not fat though. Always smiling. Svetlana loved her too.” Artyom was one of the few who heard how Stalin spoke to her: “he’d say about her birthday or something, ‘Of course I must give you a present.’ ”

  “I don’t need anything, Comrade Stalin,” she replied.

  “Well, if I forget, remind me.” At the end of the thirties, Valechka became Stalin’s trusted companion and effectively his secret wife, in a culture when most Bolshevik couples were not formally married. “Valya looked after Father’s creature comforts,” Svetlana said. The court understood that she was his companion and no more was said about it. “Whether or not Istomina was Stalin’s wife is nobody’s business,” said the ageing Molotov. “Engels lived with his housekeeper.” Budyonny and Kalinin “married” their housekeepers.

  “My father said she was very close to him,” asserts Nadezhda Vlasika. Kaganovich’s daughter-in-law heard from “Iron Lazar”: “I only k
now that Stalin had one common-law wife. Valechka, his waitress. She loved him.”144

  Valechka appeared like a jolly, quiet and buxom hospital sister, always wearing a white apron at Stalin’s dinners. No one noticed when she attended Yalta and Potsdam: this was as Stalin wished it. Henceforth Stalin’s private life was frozen in about 1939: the dramas of Nadya and Zhenya that had caused him pain and anger were over. “These matters,” recalled the Polish Communist Jakob Berman, who was often at Kuntsevo during the forties, “were arranged with extreme discretion and never filtered out beyond his closest circle. Stalin was always very careful there shouldn’t be any gossip about him . . . Stalin understood the danger of gossip.” If other men could be betrayed by their wives, there at least he was safe. He sometimes asked Valechka’s political opinions as an ordinary person. Nonetheless, for this political man, she was no companion. He remained lonely.9

  Between 24 February and 16 March 1939, Beria presided over the executions of 413 important prisoners, including Marshal Yegorov and ex-Politburo members Kosior, Postyshev and Chubar: he was already living in the dacha of the last of these. Now he suggested to Stalin that they call a halt, or there would be no one left to arrest. Poskrebyshev marked up the old Central Committee with VN—Enemy of the People—and the date of execution. The next day, Stalin reflected to Malenkov: “I think we’re well and truly rid of the opposition millstone. We need new forces, new people . . .” The message was sent down the vertikal of power: when Mekhlis demanded more arrests in the army for “lack of revolutionary loyalty,” Stalin replied: “I propose to limit ourselves to an official reprimand . . . (I don’t see any ill will in their actions—these aren’t mistakes but misunderstandings).”145

  Blaming all excesses on Yezhov, Stalin protected his other grotesques. The “denunciatrix” of Kiev, Nikolaenko, was discredited. But she once again appealed to Stalin and Khrushchev: “I ask you to check everything, where I was mistaken, where I was lied to and where I was provoked, I’m ready to be punished,” she wrote to Khrushchev. But then, still playing high politics, she warned Stalin: “I’m sure there are too many remnants of Enemies in Kiev . . . Dear Joseph Vissarionovich, I’ve no words to tell you how to understand me but you understand us, your people, without words. I write to you with bitter tears.” Stalin protected her: “Comrade Khrushchev, I ask you to take measures to let Nikolaenko find calm and fruitful work, J.St.”

  The victims of his creatures could now appeal to Stalin. Khrulev, who was to be the outstanding Red Army quartermaster during the Second World War, complained to Stalin about the peripatetic, pompous Mekhlis. “The lion is the king of the jungle,” Stalin laughed.

  “Yes but Mekhlis’s a dangerous animal,” said Khrulev, “who told me he’d do all he could . . . [to destroy me].”

  Stalin smiled genially. “Well if me and you . . . fight Mekhlis together, do you think we’ll manage?” retorted the “lion king.”

  Stalin had not forgotten his greatest enemy: Beria and one of the talented dirty tricks specialists in quiet and quick death, Pavel Sudoplatov, were received in the Little Corner where, pacing silently in soft Georgian boots, Stalin laconically ordered: “Trotsky should be eliminated within a year.”10

  On 10 March 1939, the 1,900 delegates of the Eighteenth Congress gathered146 to declare the end of a slaughter that had been a success, if slightly marred by Yezhov’s manic excesses. The survivors, from Molotov to Zhdanov, remained at the top but were challenged by the younger generation: Khrushchev joined the Politburo while Beria was elected candidate and “Melanie” Malenkov became a CC Secretary. This leadership ruled the country for the next decade without a single casualty: contrary to his myth, Stalin, a master of divide and rule, could be surprisingly loyal to his protégés. But not to the Blackberry.

  Yezhov was on ice yet he still attended the Politburo, sat next to Stalin at the Bolshoi and turned up for work at Water Transport, where he sat through meetings throwing paper darts. He caroused by day but appeared at Congress evening sessions, trying to get permission to speak. “I strongly ask you to talk with me for only one minute,” he wrote to Stalin. “Give me the opportunity.” Still a CC member, he attended the meeting of Party elders where the names for the new body were selected.

  No one objected to his name until Stalin called Yezhov forward: “Well what do you think of yourself ? Are you capable of being a member of the Central Committee?” Yezhov protested his devotion to the Party and Stalin—he could not imagine what he had done wrong. Since all the other murderers were being promoted, the dwarf’s bafflement is understandable.

  “Is that so?” Stalin started mentioning Enemies close to Yezhov.

  “Joseph Vissarionovich!” Yezhov cried out. “You know it was I— I myself—who disclosed their conspiracy! I came to you and reported it . . .”

  “Yes yes yes. When you felt you were about to be caught, then you came in a hurry. But what about before that? Were you organizing a conspiracy? Did you want to kill Stalin? Top officials of the NKVD are plotting but you are supposedly not involved. You think I don’t see anything? Do you remember who you sent on a certain date for duty with Stalin? Who? With revolvers? Why revolvers near Stalin? Why? To kill Stalin? Well? Go on, get out of here! I don’t know, comrades, is it possible to keep him as a member of the Central Committee? I doubt it. Of course think about it . . . As you wish . . . But I doubt it.”

  Yezhov was determined to spread the guilt and avenge his betrayal by destroying Malenkov, whom he now denounced. On 10 April, Stalin ordered Yezhov to attend a meeting to hear these accusations. Yezhov reported to Malenkov who ritualistically removed Yezhov’s photograph from the array of leadership icons on his office wall like an angel removed from the heavens. Beria and his Georgian prince-executioner, Tsereteli, opened the door and arrested Blackberry, conveying “Patient Number One” to the infirmary inside Sukhanov prison.

  The search of Yezhov’s apartment revealed bottles of vodka, empty, half-empty and full, lying around, 115 counter-revolutionary books, guns and those macabre relics: the flattened bullets, wrapped in paper, labelled Zinoviev and Kamenev. More importantly, the search revealed that Yezhov had collected materials about Stalin’s pre-1917 police record: was this evidence that he was an Okhrana spy? There was also evidence against Malenkov.147 The papers disappeared into Beria’s safe.

  Stalin was now so omnipotent that when he mispronounced a word from the podium, every subsequent speaker repeated the mistake. “If I’d said it right,” Molotov reminisced, “Stalin would have felt I was correcting him.” He was very “touchy and proud.”148 Europe was on the verge of war and Stalin turned his attention to the tightrope walk between Nazi Germany and the Western democracies. Meanwhile, Zhdanov heralded the end of Yezhov’s slaughter, joking (in execrable taste) about “big Enemies,” “little Enemies” and “wee Enemies” while Stalin and Beria planned some of their most wanton acts of depravity.11

  PART SIX

  The Great Game Hitler and Stalin 1939–1941

  28

  The Carve-Up of Europe: Molotov, Ribbentrop and Stalin’s Jewish Question

  When Stalin concentrated on diplomacy, he first aimed his guns at his own diplomats. On the night of 3 May 1939, NKVD troops surrounded the Foreign Commissariat, bringing home the urgency of the countdown to war and the coming revolution of alliances. Molotov, Beria and Malenkov arrived to inform Maxim “Papasha” Litvinov, the worldly rambunctious champion of European peace through “collective security,” that he had been sacked. This was not a surprise to Litvinov: Stalin would pat his Foreign Commissar and say, “You see, we can reach agreement.”

  “Not for long,” Papasha Litvinov replied.

  The new Foreign Commissar was Molotov, already the Premier. Stalin emerged from the Terror more paranoid and more confident, a state of mind that made him, if anything, less equipped to analyse the dangerous international situation. Mikoyan noticed this new Stalin “was an utterly changed person—absolutely suspicious, ruthless and boundle
ssly selfconfident, often speaking of himself in the third person. I think he went barmy.” Kaganovich recalled that he hardly ever called together the Politburo now, deciding most things informally. Stalin does not “know the West,” thought Litvinov. “If our opponents were a bunch of shahs and sheikhs, he’d outwit them.” Nor were his two main advisers, Molotov and Zhdanov, any better qualified. Stalin educated himself by reading history, particularly Bismarck’s memoirs, but he did not realize that the Iron Chancellor was a conventional statesman compared to Hitler. Henceforth Stalin quoted Talleyrand and Bismarck liberally.

  Molotov always said that Bolshevik politics was the best training for diplomacy and regarded himself as a politician not a diplomat, but he was proud of his new career: “Everything was in Stalin’s fist, in my fist,” he said. But he worked in his tireless, methodical way under immense pressure, arguing ideas through with Stalin, while terrorizing his staff in “blind rages.” Yet in his letters to his wife Polina, he revealed the vainglory and passion within: “We live under constant pressure not to miss something . . . I so miss you and our daughter, I want to hold you in my arms, to my breast with all your sweetness and charm . . .” More direct and less intellectual than Stalin, he told Polina that he was starting to read not about Talleyrand but about Hitler. Apart from the smouldering desire for Polina, the most amusing part of these letters was the unabashed delight Molotov took in his new fame. “I can tell you, without boasting,” he boasted, “that our opposite numbers feel . . . they deal with people that know their stuff.”