Stalin: A Biography

by Robert Service

  He was highly conspiratorial. According to Politburo secretary Boris Bazhanov, Stalin’s desk had four telephones but inside the desk was a further apparatus giving him the facility to eavesdrop on the conversations of dozens of the most influential communist leaders. He could do this without going through the Kremlin switchboard, and the information he gathered must have alerted him to any manoeuvres being undertaken against him.29 Personal assistants such as Lev Mekhlis and Grigori Kanner carried out whatever shady enterprise he thought up.30 He was ruthless against his enemies. When Kamenev asked him about the question of gaining a majority in the party, Stalin scoffed: ‘Do you know what I think about this? I believe that who votes how in the party is unimportant. What is extremely important is who counts the votes and how they are recorded.’31 He was implying that he expected the central party apparatus to fiddle the voting figures if ever they went against him.

  This sort of remark gave Stalin the reputation of an unprincipled bureaucrat. He revelled in his deviousness when talking to his associates. But there was much more to him. He had the potential of a true leader. He was decisive, competent, confident and ambitious. The choice of him rather than Zinoviev or Kamenev to head the charge against Trotski at the Thirteenth Party Conference showed that this was beginning to be understood by other Central Committee members. He was coming out of the shadows. From the last months of 1924 he showed a willingness to go on attacking Trotski without keeping Zinoviev and Kamenev at his side. Kamenev had made a slip by referring to ‘nepman Russia’ instead of ‘NEP Russia’. The so-called nepman was typically a private trader who took advantage of the economic reforms since 1921 and who was resented by Bolsheviks. Stalin made a meal of Kamenev’s slip in the party press. Around the same time Zinoviev had described the Soviet regime as ‘a dictatorship of the party’. Stalin as Party General Secretary vigorously repudiated the term as a description of political reality.32 Kamenev and Zinoviev were put on notice that they should look out for themselves. In autumn 1924 Stalin moved against their leading supporters. I. A. Zelenski was replaced as Moscow City Party Secretary by Stalin’s supporter Nikolai Uglanov.33

  Strategic factors were coming between Stalin on one side and Zinoviev and Kamenev on the other. Stalin wanted to defend the case for the possibilities of ‘building socialism’ in the USSR even during the NEP. This countered Trotski’s argument, fleshed out in The Lessons of October in 1924, that the October Revolution would expire unless sustained by co-operation with socialist regimes in Europe. Trotski was extending his pre-revolutionary ideas about the need for ‘permanent revolution’. To Stalin his booklet seemed both anti-Leninist in doctrine and pernicious in practice to the stability of the NEP. Bukharin, an arch-leftist in the Bolshevik leadership in the Civil War, agreed with Stalin and was rewarded with promotion to full membership of the Politburo after the Thirteenth Party Congress. He and Stalin began to act together against Zinoviev and Kamenev. Bukharin, as he pondered party policy after Lenin, believed that the NEP offered a framework for the country’s more peaceful and evolutionary ‘transition to socialism’. He disregarded traditional party hostility to kulaks and called on them to ‘enrich themselves’. He sought a moderation of repressive methods in the state’s handling of society and wished to put the emphasis on indoctrinating the urban working class. He saw peasant co-operatives as a basis for ‘socialist construction’.

  Stalin and Bukharin rejected Trotski and the Left Opposition as doctrinaires who by their actions would bring the USSR to perdition. The leftist push for a more active foreign policy might provoke a retaliatory invasion by the Western powers. Trade would be ruined along with Soviet capital investment plans. The Trotskyist demand for an increased rate of industrial growth, moreover, could be realised only through the heavier taxation of the better-off stratum of the peasantry. The sole result would be the rupture of the linkage between peasants and working class recommended by Lenin. The recrudescence of social and economic tensions could lead to the fall of the USSR.

  Zinoviev and Kamenev felt uncomfortable with so drastic a turn towards the market economy. They still feared Trotski. They also wanted to maintain the peasant–worker linkage. But they were unwilling to give their imprimatur to Bukharin’s evolutionary programme; they disliked Stalin’s movement to a doctrine that socialism could be built in a single country — and they simmered with resentment at the unceasing accumulation of power by Stalin. Zinoviev and Kamenev were vulnerable to the charge of having betrayed the Bolshevik Central Committee in October 1917. They had to prove their radicalism. It was only a matter of time before they challenged their anti-Trotski allies Stalin and Bukharin. Stalin was ready and waiting for them. To most observers he seemed calmer than during those earlier disputes when he had flown off the handle in internal party disputes. But this was not the case. Stalin was just as angry and ferocious as ever. What had changed was that he was no longer the outsider and the victim. Stalin dominated the Orgburo and the Secretariat. With Bukharin he led the Politburo. He could afford to maintain an outward tranquillity and catch his enemies unawares.

  He continued to act in such a fashion. He had survived Lenin’s criticism by the skin of his teeth. He had to show others that he was not as black as he had been painted. His gang in the central party leadership would help him. But he had to watch out for others. Dzierżyński did not owe him any favours. Krupskaya, after her early overtures to Stalin, kept her own counsel. Bukharin himself was not dependable; he went on talking amicably to Trotski, Zinoviev and Kamenev even while castigating their policies. Bolshevik politics were in dangerous flux.

  21. JOSEPH AND NADYA

  The struggles among the communist party factions were also a contest for individual supremacy. Trotski, Zinoviev, Bukharin and Stalin each felt worthy to succeed Lenin, and even Kamenev had ambition. Stalin was tired of seeing his rivals strutting on the public stage. He accepted that they were good orators and that he would never match them in this. Yet he was proud — in his brittle, over-sensitive way — that his contribution to Bolshevism was mainly practical in nature: he thought praktiki like himself were the party’s backbone. The praktiki looked up to Lenin as the eagle who scattered his opponents like mere chickens. Stalin seemed unimpressive to those who did not know him and indeed to many who did; but he was already determined to fly into history as the party’s second eagle.1 He did not just scatter his rivals for the succession: whenever possible, he swooped down and tore them to bits. Chatting to Kamenev and Dzierżyński in 1923, he had explained his general attitude: ‘The greatest delight is to pick out one’s enemy, prepare all the details of the blow, to slake one’s thirst for a cruel revenge and then go home to bed!’2

  Such was the man who had taken Nadya Allilueva as his wife after the October Revolution. There had been no wedding ceremony, but their daughter Svetlana was told that her parents lived as spouses from some unspecified time before the Soviet government’s transfer from Petrograd to Moscow in 1918. (Apparently the official registration did not take place until 24 March 1919.)3 Nadya was less than half his age at the time and he was her revolutionary hero; and she had yet to learn that the harsh features of his character were not reserved exclusively for the enemies of communism.

  At first things went well. Alexandra Kollontai, who got to know Nadya in the winter of 1919–20, was impressed by her ‘charming beauty of soul’ as well as by Stalin’s demeanour: ‘He takes a great deal of notice of her.’4 But trouble was already in the air. Joseph wanted a wife who took household management as her priority; this was one of Nadya’s accomplishments which had caught his eye in 1917.5 Nadya, however, wanted a professional career. As the daughter of a Bolshevik veteran, she had carried out important technical tasks on the party’s behalf in the Civil War. Although she had no professional qualifications, she had a grammar school education and proved a competent clerk at a time when politically reliable secretaries were few.6 She soon learned how to decode telegrams transmitting confidential information among Soviet leaders, inclu
ding her husband.7 Lenin employed her on his personal staff.8 Joseph was more often absent on campaign than at home until autumn 1920, leaving Nadya to devote herself to her Sovnarkom duties. She became so close to the Lenins that if Nadezhda Krupskaya was going away on a trip, she would ask her to feed their cat. (Lenin could not be depended upon.)9 Nadya joined the party, assuming that her involvement in Bolshevik administration at the highest level would continue.

  Her hope was dashed when Joseph returned from the Soviet–Polish War and family chores increased. Joseph wanted a settled domesticity at the end of his working day, whenever that might be. Matters came to a head late in the winter of 1920–1. Nadya, pregnant since June 1920, had gone on working while carrying the child. Joseph himself had fallen badly ill. In the Civil War he had frequently complained of his aches and pains as well as his ‘exhaustion’.10 No one had taken him seriously because he had usually done this when trying to resign in high dudgeon. Brother-in-law Fëdor Alliluev, seeing him before the Tenth Party Congress, remarked how tired he looked. Stalin agreed: ‘Yes, I’m tired. I need to go off to the woods, to the woods! To relax and have a proper rest and sleep as one ought!’11 He took a few days off. It was only when he retired to his bed after the Congress that medical attention became an obvious necessity. Professor Vladimir Rozanov, one of the Kremlin doctors, diagnosed chronic appendicitis. Rozanov said the problem might have existed for a dozen years; he could barely believe Stalin had been able to stand upright. Instant surgery was vital.

  Operations for appendicitis in that period were often fatal. Rozanov worried that the procedure could infect Stalin’s peritoneum; he also thought him dangerously thin.12 Initially a local anaesthetic was administered because of his weakened condition. Yet the pain became unbearable and the operation was not completed until after a dose of chloroform. Allowed home afterwards, Stalin lay on a divan reading books and convalesced over the next two months. As he got better, he went out in search of company. By June he had been passed fit. Coming upon Mikhail Kalinin in discussion with other Bolsheviks about the NEP, he announced his return to work: ‘It’s oppressive to lie around by yourself and so I’ve got up: it’s boring without one’s comrades.’13 This sentiment might easily have been included in any collection of memoirs about Stalin; but the rest of Fëdor Alliluev’s story was too embarrassing for Stalin to allow publication. He would not permit people to discover that he had ever been anything but tough in mind and body.

  Joseph’s illness and recuperation coincided with the arrival of their first child. Vasili Stalin was born in Moscow on 21 March 1921. Delight at his safe delivery was tempered for Nadya by the fact that Joseph increased pressure on her to dedicate herself to domesticity. No one on her side of the family helped her out: all of them, including her mother Olga, were immersed in political activity. Olga was anyway hardly a model for child rearers. When Nadya and the other Alliluev children had been young, they had often had to fend for themselves while their parents went about their professional lives and revolutionary activity.

  Nadya could not turn for help to the other side of the family: Joseph’s mother Keke adamantly refused to move to Moscow. In June 1921, after recovering from the appendicitis operation, Stalin had headed south on party business to Georgia and visited Keke. The son greeted his mother without the warmth that might have been expected after their long separation.14 She knew her own mind and did not flinch from enquiring: ‘Son, there’s none of the tsar’s blood on your hands, is there?’ Shuffling on his feet, he made the sign of the cross and swore that he had had no part in it. His friend Sergo Ordzhonikidze expressed surprise at this religious recidivism; but Stalin exclaimed: ‘She’s a believer! I wish to God that our people believed in Marxism as they do in God!’15 They had been apart from each other for many years; and even though he had wriggled out of answering her straightforwardly, her question to him showed she knew a gulf of belief would continue to keep them apart. As a Christian Keke had reason to tell her son that the Red Kremlin was no place for her. For her safety and comfort, Stalin moved her into one of the servants’ apartment in the old Viceroy’s palace in Tbilisi. Budu Mdivani commented that the local authorities increased the guard on her: ‘This is so that she doesn’t give birth to another Stalin!’16

  But Joseph did not come back unaccompanied. In Georgia he also sought out his son Yakov by his first wife Ketevan. Yakov had been looked after by Ketevan’s brother Alexander Svanidze and his wife Maria. Joseph hardly knew the thirteen-year-old Yakov but wished to take him at last into his care — or at least into Nadya’s. Nor was this the end of the family’s expansion. The leading Bolshevik F. A. Sergeev, alias Artëm, perished in a plane crash in July 1921 leaving a young son. It was the custom in the party for such orphans to be fostered by other Bolsheviks, and this is what the Stalins did. The lad Artëm Sergeev lived with them until manhood (and became a major-general in the Red Army in the Second World War).17 Stalin also interested himself in the upbringing of Nikolai Patolichev, the son of a comrade who reportedly had died in his arms in the Soviet–Polish War of 1920.18 Young Patolichev was not brought into the family. Nevertheless in the space of a few months the Stalin household had grown in number from two to five.

  Nadya brought in domestic assistance while her busy husband focused his energies on politics. She hired a nanny for Vasili; she also employed servants. She herself was like a terrier in getting raw materials for the kitchen. The Kremlin administrative regime, run by Stalin’s old friend Abel Enukidze, assigned a quota of food products for each resident family. Joseph, whose health had troubled him throughout the Civil War, had been recommended a diet with plenty of poultry. As a result he had acquired the monthly right to fifteen chickens, a head of cheese and fifteen pounds of potatoes. By mid-March 1921, days before the new baby was due, the family had already eaten its way through ten of its fifteen chickens. (Either the birds were unusually small and thin or the Stalins had the appetite of horses.) Nadya wrote a request for an increased quota.19 (Even before she married Joseph she had known how to handle the Soviet bureaucracy: in November 1918, after the Alliluevs moved to Moscow, she wrote to Yakov Sverdlov asking for a better room for them.)20 In later years she made further pleas. One of them was a request for a new kindergarten; she was turned down on that occasion.21

  Nadya’s wish to work outside the home was conventional among young Bolshevik women, who combined a dedication to the revolutionary cause and to women’s emancipation. She did not object to supervising household management so long as she had servants and could continue to be employed in Lenin’s office. The double role was very heavy and the lack of support from Joseph made it scarcely bearable. He was frequently late in getting back to the Kremlin flat. He was uncouth in manners and had an obscene tongue when irritated. Nor was his language confined to phrases like ‘Go to the Devil!’ Hating to be contradicted, he used the foulest swear-words on his wife. His rough manner was extreme, and it cannot be discounted that he was compensating to some degree for personal insecurities. After hurting his arm as a boy, he had been unable to join in the normal rough-and-tumbles of childhood. He had been rejected on physical grounds by the Imperial Army in the Great War. Stalin wanted to be thought a man’s man. In fact, according to his grand-nephew Vladimir Alliluev, he had carefully manicured nails and ‘almost a woman’s fingers’.22 Did he have some residual doubts about his manliness by contemporary criteria? If he did, it was Nadya who paid the price.

  Like most of his male contemporaries, Stalin expected a wife to obey. Here he was disappointed, for Nadya refused to be meek. Disputes between them were frequent more or less from the start of their sustained cohabitation. She too had her moods. Indeed it is now clear that she had mental problems. Perhaps they were hereditary. Schizophrenia of some kind seems to have affected previous generations of her mother’s side of the family; and her brother Fëdor, after an acutely traumatic event after the Civil War when the former bank robber Kamo stage-managed a scene in which he threatened to shoot him, had
a breakdown from which he never recovered.23 Nadya had a volatile temperament and, although she remained in love with Joseph, the marriage continued to be rancorous between the patches of tranquillity.

  Someone in the central party apparatus decided that Nadya was unsuitable for party membership. The rumour was that it was none other than Joseph. In December 1921 she was excluded from the party: this was a disgrace for anyone working as she did in the offices of Sovnarkom. Eventually she could have lost her job. The charge was that she had not passed the various tests applied to all party members and had not bothered to prepare herself for them. Nor had she helped with mundane party work; this was all the less acceptable inasmuch as she was ‘a person of the intelligentsia’. Only one Central Control Commission member spoke up for her even though Lenin himself had written warmly in her support.24 Nadya begged for another chance and promised to make a greater effort in the way that was demanded. Initially the decision was made to ‘exclude her as ballast, completely uninterested in party work’; but finally the Central Control Commission allowed her to keep the secondary status of a ‘candidate’ party member.25 She could have done without this contretemps in a year full of problems; but at least the eventual decision enabled her to go on working for Lenin’s office without a blemish on her record.