Stalin: A Biography

by Robert Service

  It cannot be proved that Joseph had been behind the move to take away her party card; and Nadya never expressly blamed him. But he belonged to the Politburo and the Orgburo and was already intervening in the Secretariat’s work in 1921:26 he could have put in a good word for her if he had wanted. But she had survived. Stalin accepted the situation and avoided interfering with her professional aspirations again. She functioned as one of Lenin’s secretaries even while Lenin and Stalin were falling out. Krupskaya even asked her to liaise with Kamenev on Lenin’s behalf about the Georgian Affair.27 It would be strange if Nadya kept this a secret from her husband. Perhaps he at last began to see the advantages of having a working wife.

  At home Nadya was a severe mother and denied to the children the open affection she directed at Joseph. Strict standards of behaviour were enforced. Yakov, who hardly knew his father before moving to Moscow, reacted badly to this. Joseph’s work kept him away from the apartment and the bond between them never solidified. Such interest as he took in his son tended to involve pressure. He pushed books at him and expected him to read them. ‘Yasha!’ he wrote on the cover of B. Andreev’s The Conquest of Nature, ‘Read this book without fail!’28 But it was Nadya who had to handle Yakov on a daily basis and, as her letter to Joseph’s mother in October 1922 indicated, she found him exasperating:29

  I send you a big kiss and pass on greetings from Soso: he’s very healthy, feels very well, works hard, and remembers about you.

  Yasha [i.e. Yakov] studies, plays up, smokes and doesn’t listen to me. Vasenka [i.e. Vasili] also plays up, insults his mama and also won’t listen to me. He hasn’t yet started smoking. Joseph will definitely teach him to since he always give him a puff on his papiroska.

  A papiroska is a cigarette with an empty tube at the end which acts like a cigarette-holder to allow smoking while wearing gloves in sub-zero temperatures. It was in character for Joseph to expect Nadya to enforce discipline while he himself disrupted it.

  Life nevertheless had its pleasant side. The Stalins lived in two places after the Soviet–Polish War: their Kremlin flat and the dacha they called Zubalovo near the old sawmill at Usovo outside Moscow. By a bizarre coincidence, the dacha’s owner had belonged to the Zubalishvili business family which had built the hostel that became the Tiflis Spiritual Seminary. Probably it tickled the fancy of Stalin and his neighbour Mikoyan that they were living in homes put up by an industrialist from the south Caucasus against whom they had once helped to lead strikes.30

  Several dachas were made state property in the same district in 1919 and the Stalins occupied Zubalovo-4. Stalin, who had never had a house of his own,31 cleared the trees and bushes to turn his patch into a spot to his liking. Near by was the River Moskva, where the children could swim in the summer. It was a beautiful spot which might have appeared in the plays of Anton Chekhov; but whereas Chekhov described how the old rural gentry were supplanted by the nouveaux riches, this was a case of the nouveaux riches being expelled by revolutionaries. While gloating over the Zubalishvilis’ forced departure, Stalin had no inhibition about creating a style of life that was similarly bourgeois. When they could, the entire Stalin family went out to Zubalovo. They gathered honey. They searched for mushrooms and wild strawberries. Joseph took pot-shots at pheasants and rabbits and the family ate what he killed. The Stalins kept open house and visitors stayed as long as they wanted. Budënny and Voroshilov often popped over to drink and sing with Joseph. Ordzhonikidze and Bukharin were others who spent time there. Gentle-mannered Bukharin was a particular favourite with Nadya and the children: he even brought a tame grey fox with him and did a painting of the trees by the dacha.32

  In the summers they holidayed in the south of the USSR, usually in one of the many state dachas by the Black Sea. Stalin had material couriered to him whenever he needed to be consulted. But he knew how to enjoy himself. There were always plenty of Caucasian dishes and wines on his table and the visitors were many. Georgian and Abkhazian politicians queued to ingratiate themselves. His Moscow cronies, if they were staying in nearby dachas, called on the family; and picnics were arranged in the hills or by the seaside. Although Stalin could not swim, he loved the fresh air and the beach as well.

  He also used the vacations as a time to allow his body to recuperate. Joseph’s health had always troubled him and since 1917 he had resorted to various traditional cures. The rheumatism in his arm and his bothersome cough — probably caused by his pipe-smoking — figured often in his letters.33 Once he had stopped at Nalchik high up in the north Caucasus. It was a place visited by tuberculosis patients.34 But Stalin’s specific complaints were different; and for his rheumatism, which affected his arm every spring, he was advised by Mikoyan to try the hot baths at Matsesta near Sochi on the Black Sea coast.35 Stalin tried this and found the waters at Matsesta to work ‘a lot better than the Essentuki muds’.36 Essentuki was one of the spa towns of the north Caucasus famous for the medical benefits of its soil. Stalin mostly, in any case, preferred to go to Sochi for his summer vacations.37 From 1926 he put himself in the hands of Dr Ivan Valedinski, a great believer in ‘balneology’. When Stalin made his way south in the summer, he pocketed instructions from Valedinski: he was told to take a dozen baths at Matsesta before returning home. Stalin asked for permission to enliven his stay with a glass or two of brandy at weekends. Valedinski was stern: Stalin could take a glass on Saturdays but definitely not on Sundays.38

  Perhaps the doctor forgot that Sundays were not sacred for an atheist. In any case Stalin was never a trusting patient; he had his own pack of medicines and used them as he saw fit regardless of advice from doctors.39 It is doubtful that he went along with everything that Valedinski specified. But undoubtedly he felt better than earlier. The hot baths eased the pain in his joints and the aspirin prescribed by Valedinski reduced the pain in his neck. A heart check-up in 1927 confirmed him as generally robust.40

  More worrisome to Stalin than his recurrent ill health were his growing difficulties with Nadya. Periods of calm and tenderness were interrupted by explosions of mutual irritation. Nadya and the children spent time with him in the south; and she and Joseph wrote to each other if for some reason she could not stay there.41 Her absence became normal once she started a student’s course at the Industrial Academy: the beginning of term coincided with her husband’s annual holiday leave. Their letters to each other were tender. He called her Tatka and she called him Joseph. She was solicitous about him: ‘I very much beg you to look after yourself. I kiss you deeply, deeply, as you kissed me when we said goodbye.’42 She also wrote to his mother on Joseph’s behalf, giving news of the children and passing on little details about life in Moscow. Stalin himself wrote to Georgia only infrequently. He was too preoccupied with political business, and anyway he had hardly bothered about his blood relatives for many years. Usually his letters to his mother were brief to the point of curtness and ended with a phrase such as ‘Live a thousand years!’43 Nadya was doing her best for him, but she could never get the appreciation and understanding from her husband that she craved.

  His harshness would have demoralised the most optimistic spirit. Nadya’s mental condition worsened and she was given to episodes of despair. Stalin’s flirtations with other women probably played a part in this. On the secretarial staff of the Politburo was a beautiful young woman, Tamara Khazanova, who befriended Nadya; she came round to the Kremlin flat and helped with the children. At some point it would seem that Stalin took a fancy to her and pursued his interest.44

  Nadya descended into gloom. She expressed her thoughts in a letter to her friend Maria Svanidze, the sister of Joseph’s first wife:45

  You write that you’re bored. You know, dearest, that it’s the same everywhere. I have absolutely nothing to do with anyone in Moscow. Sometimes it seems strange after so many years to have no close friends, but this obviously depends on one’s character. Moreover, it’s strange that I feel myself closer to non-members of the party (women, of course). The obvious explan
ation is that such people are simpler.

  I greatly regret tying myself down again in new family matters. In our day this isn’t very easy because generally a lot of the new prejudices are strange and if you don’t work, then you’re looked upon as an ‘old woman’.

  ‘New family matters’ was Nadya’s odd way of referring to her latest pregnancy. Because of this she had to delay getting the requisite qualifications for professional employment. Enrolment on some training course remained her ambition. She told Maria to take the same attitude or else spend her time running errands for others.46

  The child she was expecting was born on 28 February 1926; it was a girl, and they named her Svetlana. Nadya, however, remained determined to free herself of domesticity and in autumn 1929 she got herself enrolled at the Industrial Academy in central Moscow on a course specialising in artificial fibres. The Stalin household was left to servants and nannies.

  Each morning she left the Kremlin and made for the Industrial Academy. She left behind all privilege. She was also leaving a middle-aged environment and joining people of her own age. Most of the students were unaware that Nadya Allilueva was the wife of the Party General Secretary — and even if they knew this, they did not act much differently towards her. Off set Nadya without chauffeur or bodyguard, taking the same forms of transport as her fellow students. She wrote to Joseph about a very tedious journey on 12 September 1929:47

  Today I can say that things are better since I had an exam in written maths which went well but in general everything is not so successful. To be precise, I had to be at the I[ndustrial] A[cademy] by nine o’clock and of course I left home at 8.30, and what happens but the tram has broken down. I started to wait for a bus, but there wasn’t one and so I decided to take a taxi so as not to be late. I got into it and, blow me, we’d only gone 100 yards and the taxi came to a halt; something in it as well had gone bust.

  While claiming to find this catalogue of service breakdowns funny she pleaded a bit too hard for this to convince. Nadya had high standards in everything and was annoyed by the deterioration in conditions. She was making sure that Joseph learned something about the kind of life facing ordinary metropolitan inhabitants: the noise, mess and disorder.48

  Even Joseph sometimes encountered such unpleasantness for himself. On one occasion in the late 1920s he and Molotov were walking outside the Kremlin on some business or other. Molotov never forgot what ensued:49

  I remember a heavy storm; the snow was piling up and Stalin and I were walking across the Manège. We had no bodyguard. Stalin was wearing a fur coat, long boots and a hat with ear-flaps. No one knew who he was. Suddenly a beggar stuck to us: ‘Give us some money, good sirs!’ Stalin reached into his pocket, pulled out a ten-ruble note and handed it to him, and we walked on. The beggar, though, yelled after us: ‘Ah, you damned bourgeois!’ This made Stalin laugh: ‘Just try and understand our people. If you give them a little, it’s bad; if you give them a lot, it’s also bad!’

  But generally he was insulated from experiences of this kind.

  What worried Nadya, though, was that he had cut himself off from a sustained family commitment. He was bad-tempered and domineering at home. She suspected him of having flings with attractive women who came his way. And he otherwise seldom thought of anything but politics. He felt fulfilled not in their Kremlin flat or at Zubalovo but in his office a few hundred yards across Red Square on Old Square. This was where the Central Committee was situated from 1923. He had his office on an upper floor near Molotov, Kaganovich and others.50 Stalin spent most of the day and often a large part of the evening there. Nadya did not nag him about being left on her own, but she did feel that his behaviour at home — when he was there — left a lot to be desired. Her unhappiness was understandable. Stalin had no interests outside work and study apart from the occasional hunting expedition. Unlike Molotov and his other cronies, he did not play tennis or skittles. He did not even go to the cinema. The marriage of Joseph and Nadya looked like a divorce waiting to happen.

  22. FACTIONALIST AGAINST FACTIONS

  The year 1925 brought the disputes in the Politburo to a head. Personal bickering became all-out factional conflict as Zinoviev and Kamenev moved into open opposition to Bukharin and Stalin. They wrangled over the party’s internal organisation as well as over international relations. Official agrarian measures were also highly controversial. Bukharin in his enthusiasm for the New Economic Policy had said to the more affluent peasants: ‘Enrich yourselves!’1 This hardly coincided with Lenin’s comments on kulaks over the years. Even in his last dictated articles Lenin had envisaged a steady movement by the peasantry towards a system of farming co-ops; he had never expressly advocated the profit motive as the motor of agricultural regeneration. Stalin’s ally Bukharin appeared to be undermining basic Leninist ideas, and Zinoviev and Kamenev were not just being opportunistic in castigating this. They generally objected to the growing compromises of the New Economic Policy as it had been developed. Stalin and Bukharin stuck together to see off their factional adversaries. Having fought against Trotski and the Left Opposition, they battled against Zinoviev and Kamenev when they called for a more radical interpretation of the ‘union of the working class with the peasantry’. The survival of the NEP was at stake.

  Clashes occurred at the Central Committee in October 1925. Zinoviev and Kamenev had arrived with assurances of support from Grigori Sokolnikov, the People’s Commissar of Finances, and Lenin’s widow Nadezhda Krupskaya. Stalin and Bukharin carried the majority on that occasion. But neither Zinoviev nor Kamenev had lost their following at the party’s highest level. Stalin therefore decided to attack them openly at the Fourteenth Party Congress in December 1925. He did this deftly by revealing that they had once tried to get him to agree to Trotski’s expulsion from the party. Sanctimoniously disclaiming his own propensity for butchery, Stalin announced:2

  We are for unity, we’re against chopping. The policy of chopping is repugnant to us. The party wants unity, and it will achieve this together with comrades Kamenev and Zinoviev if this is what they want — and without them if they don’t want it.

  Although his own personality had been criticised by Lenin as crude and divisive, he contrived to suggest that the menace of a party split was embodied by what was becoming known as the Leningrad Opposition.

  Kamenev put things starkly:3

  We’re against creating a theory of ‘the Leader’ [vozhdya]; we’re against making anyone into ‘the Leader’. We’re against the Secretariat, by actually combining politics and organisation, standing above the political body. We’re for the idea of our leadership being internally organised in such a fashion that there should exist a truly omnipotent Politburo uniting all our party’s politicians as well as that the Secretariat should be subordinate to it and technically carrying out its decrees… Personally I suggest that our General Secretary is not the kind of figure who can unite the old Bolshevik high command around him. It is precisely because I’ve often said this personally to comrade Stalin and precisely because I’ve often said this to a group of Leninist comrades that I repeat it at the Congress: I have come to the conclusion that comrade Stalin is incapable of performing the role of unifier of the Bolshevik high command.

  This warning appeared extravagant to the supporters of Stalin and Bukharin. But Kamenev had a point. He understood that, beneath the surface of amity between Stalin and Bukharin, Stalin aspired to become the party’s unrivalled leader.

  Zinoviev repaid Stalin for breaching the secrecy of their conversations by divulging details of the Kislovodsk episode, when even some of Stalin’s friends had discussed the desirability of trimming his powers;4 but he was relying on his rhetorical flourishes to get his way and the usual applause was no longer forthcoming. Although Zinoviev had been outmanoeuvred, he could not blame all his misfortune on the General Secretary. It had been Zinoviev who had started up the engine of mutual suspicion. If anyone had shown overweening ambition it was him. As yet he had little to counterpose
to the policies of the Stalin– Bukharin duumvirate running the Politburo. Zinoviev and Kamenev might mumble about the inadequacies of the regime, but they had until recently been pillars supporting its pediment. When Zinoviev delivered a co-report to Stalin’s official report for the Central Committee, he complained about his treatment at Stalin’s hands and warned against the further compromises with the peasantry promoted by Stalin and Bukharin. But quite what he would do in their place was not made clear.

  Zinoviev and Kamenev had put themselves in the wrong with most party leaders and militants. They had restored factionalism to the party at a dangerous time. Scarcely had Trotski been defeated than they split the ascendant party leadership. The party was insecure across the USSR. Its victory over the Whites in the Civil War left it without illusions about its isolation in the country. Workers outside the Bolshevik ranks were widely disgruntled. Peasants were far from being grateful to the Bolsheviks for the NEP; a deep resentment existed about the continuing attacks on the Russian Orthodox Church. Many members of the technical professions, while operating in Soviet institutions, yearned for the very ‘Thermidorian degeneration’ which the party feared. Thermidore had been the month in 1794 when the Jacobins who had led the French revolutionary government were overthrown and radical social experiments were brought to an end. Most creative intellectuals continued to regard Bolshevism as a plague to be eliminated. Many non-Russians, having experienced independence from Russia in the Civil War, wished to assert their national and ethnic claims beyond the bounds allowed by the USSR Constitution. ‘Nepmen’ made big money during the NEP but yearned for a more predictable commercial environment. The richer peasants — the so-called kulaks — had the same aspiration. In the shadows of public life, too, lurked the legions of members of the suppressed political parties: the Mensheviks, Socialist-Revolutionaries, Kadets and the many organisations established by various nationalities.