Stalin: A Biography

by Robert Service

  I’m sending you the two communications of [the interrogated informer] Reznikov about the anti-party — and essentially Right-Deviationist — factional Syrtsov–Lominadze grouping. Inconceivable vileness. All the details point to Reznikov’s communications corresponding to reality. They were toying with a coup d’état, they were playing at being the Politburo, and they’ve ended up in a complete collapse.

  Stalin’s suspicions were too fantastic even for Molotov, and Lominadze and Syrtsov were simply dismissed from the Central Committee.

  The atmosphere of a political witch-hunt was thickening. Nikolai Bauman was sacked from the Central Committee Secretariat for being mildly conciliatory to the former members of the United Opposition. Stalin, Molotov and Kaganovich were edgy. Their policies involved a huge gamble. In seeking to consolidate the regime and to deepen the Revolution they were attacking a wide front of enemies in politics, the economy and society. This required the vigorous deployment of party, armed forces and the OGPU. The leaders of these institutions had to be trustworthy. Each institution had to be strengthened in personnel and material resources to carry out its tasks. But, as the state’s power was increased, the danger arose that such leaders had a growing capacity to undermine the Politburo. Lukewarm followers were of no use to Stalin. Unequivocal support alone would do.

  The firmness shown by Stalin in 1930–1 failed to discourage confidential criticism in the upper echelons of the party. Although the Syrtsov-Lominadze group had been broken up, other little groupings sprouted up. One consisted of Nikolai Eismont, Vladimir Tolmachev and A. P. Smirnov. Denounced by informers in November 1932 and interrogated by the OGPU, they confessed to verbal disloyalty. But this was not enough for Stalin. The joint plenum of the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission in January 1933 condemned the leaders for having formed an ‘anti-party grouping’ and took the opportunity to reprimand Rykov and Tomski for maintaining contact with ‘anti-party elements’.30 Yet no sooner had one grouping been dealt with than another was discovered. Martemyan Ryutin, a Moscow district party functionary, hated Stalin’s personal dictatorship. He and several like-minded friends gathered in their homes for evening discussions and Ryutin produced a pamphlet demanding Stalin’s removal from office. Ryutin was arrested. Stalin, interpreting the pamphlet as a call for an assassination attempt, urged Ryutin’s execution. In the end he was sentenced to ten years in the Gulag.31

  Stalin never forgot a slight or missed a chance to hit back. He would wait as long as necessary to take his chance. Every tall tree he chopped down satiated an ego which had been injured by years of underappreciation and mockery. His memory was extraordinary, and he had his future victims marked down in a very long list. He extended his distrust to his allies and subordinates. Stalin demanded total loyalty. His daughter Svetlana, writing a reverential memoir in 1967, recalled:32

  If he cast out of his heart someone who had been known to him for a long time and if in his soul he had already translated that person into the ranks of ‘enemies’, it was impossible to hold a conversation with him about that person.

  This was his way. Once an enemy always an enemy! And even if he was compelled for internal party reasons to show mercy, he always intended to slake his thirst for vengeance in due course.

  Bukharin belatedly appreciated this. Until 1928 he had been content to have his rough, aggressive comrade at his side. When he fell out with Stalin, he knew it would be hard to get back into his favour. Still he went on trying to arrange his readmission to public life. He wrote pleading letters to Stalin. He continued to visit and stay in Stalin’s dacha at Zubalovo, talking at length with Nadya Allilueva and playing with their children. Foolishly, however, he went on blabbing about his genuine opinions to other oppositionist leaders. He sometimes did this on the telephone. Little did he suspect that the OGPU provided Stalin with transcripts of its phone-taps. Bukharin, Kamenev and Zinoviev were providing material which would make Stalin’s ultimate retaliation truly terrible. He knew their flattery and obeisance were insincere.

  His close associates were equally determined to consolidate the authority of their gang. But almost always in the course of the First Five-Year Plan it was Stalin who took the initiative in persecuting or suppressing the group’s enemies. No one was more suspicious and aggressive. Yet his maladjusted personality was not the only factor at work. Although he exaggerated the scale of immediate menace to the leading group, he and his associates had cause for anxiety. Trotski was active abroad. Bukharin became editor of the government’s newspaper Izvestiya (‘News’) in 1934; Zinoviev and Kamenev returned to prominence around the same time. An alternative leadership in waiting had re-formed itself. The Bolshevik party’s experience in 1917 showed how quickly a small political group could turn a country upside down. Stalin had to watch out. The fact that lesser fry among his own supporters — Lominadze, Syrtsov, Eismont, Tolmachev and Smirnov — had proved disloyal made him still edgier.

  Furthermore, expressions of disgust about ‘peasant questions’ were commonplace in the Red Army. Since the armed forces were imposing official agrarian policy, this had to be a cause for concern. Soldiers widely hated the collective farms. Rumours were rife. In 1930 a story flew around the Moscow Military District that Voroshilov had killed Stalin.33 The implication was obvious: a yearning existed for a change in policy. Having identified himself as the protagonist of radical change, Stalin had made himself the target of unpopularity.

  At every level of authority in the USSR there was discontent. The regional party officials felt a growing concern about Stalin’s unpredictable and violent inclinations; they did not warm to the possibility that he might go on putting pressure on them for increased rates of economic growth — and the First Five-Year Plan had made such officials more powerful than under the NEP. The party had been the vanguard institution of the Five-Year Plan. As the state took private economic sectors into its ownership and as the whole economy expanded, so each regional party official acquired enormous authority. With this authority, though, there came massive responsibility. Many officials, harassed by the Kremlin’s imposition of production quotas and acquainted with the enormous disorder and discontent across their regions, yearned for a period of retrenchment rather than continued rapid transformation. The leadership of several People’s Commissariats in Moscow and the provinces felt similar unease about Stalin and the Politburo. The Soviet state, while gaining much from the policies of the First Five-Year Plan, was far from being reconciled to unthinking acceptance of whatever policies were handed down from on high.

  Below the stratosphere of party and governmental officialdom there were millions of malcontents. Oppositionists in their thousands were waiting for Stalin’s fall. Outside the ranks of Bolshevism there were still more irreconcilables. Most Socialist-Revolutionaries, Mensheviks and Kadets had ceased political activity; but they were willing to start operating again if the opportunity arose. The same was true of Borotbists, Dashnaks, Musavatists and the many other national parties which had been suppressed in the Civil War. Then there were the priests, mullahs and rabbis who had suffered persecution by the Bolsheviks, and, although up to three million people had emigrated after the October Revolution, there remained plenty of former aristocrats, bankers, industrialists, landowners and shopkeepers who continued to long for the Soviet state’s collapse.

  Years of state violence and popular hardship had deepened the reservoir of anger with the regime. Kulaks and their supporters had been killed and deported. Industrial managers and other experts had been persecuted. ‘Bourgeois nationalists’, including Russian ones, had been imprisoned. Remaining religious leaders had been persecuted. Show trials had been organised in Moscow and the provinces. The labour-camp system held a million convicts. Whole zones in north Russia, Siberia and Kazakhstan were inhabited by involuntary colonists who lived and worked in conditions scarcely better than prison. Hostility to the regime was not confined to those who had suffered arrest or deportation. Peasants on the collective far
ms, especially in the famine areas, hated the agricultural system imposed on the villages. Workers were annoyed by the failure of the authorities to fulfil their promise to raise the popular standard of living. Even the newly promoted administrators in politics and the economy contained many who disliked the harsh practices of the regime. The display of obedience did not tell the whole truth. A multitude of individuals suffered from the punitive, arbitrary workings of the Soviet order and might be counted on to support almost any movement against Stalin and his policies.

  This was not the way the official propagandists presented the situation, and fellow travellers around the world replicated their triumphal complacency; indeed the idea that Stalin had no external reason for feeling insecure has become the standard view upon the condition of Soviet politics by the early 1930s. Dictatorships, however, are not immune to political instability, and the Bolshevik leaders sensed that the important strata in society would oust them if the opportunity ever offered itself. Stalin had won several victories. He had instigated forced-rate industrialisation and collectivisation to the accompaniment of massive repression. He had imposed the aims of ‘socialism in one country’. He had harried the former internal party oppositions. He had become the dictator of the USSR in all but name. He and his associates were not without support. Promotees enjoyed their new privileges. Members of the Komsomol and young party activists were enthused by the project of revolutionary transformation. Cultural activists admired the anti-illiteracy campaign. Military personnel relished the strengthening of the armed forces. There was an appreciation that while the Western economies were being disrupted by the effects of the Wall Street Crash, the USSR was making a great industrial advance.

  Stalin and his associates would not have lasted in office without such support. It was not yet clear whether the support outweighed the hostility in state and society. For the moment no one could challenge Stalin. He had reached the coveted summit of power. But the summit was an exposed spot, and it remained to be seen whether he would pay for having attained this position of eminence.

  26. THE DEATH OF NADYA

  Stalin became ever more isolated from daily life in the USSR as concern for his personal security grew. He no longer kept open office in the Secretariat. He visited no collective farm. While on vacation in Abkhazia allegedly he once went to inspect a market; but the Sukhum authorities, eager to impress him, got the stallholders to lower their prices for the duration of his visit: thus he was prevented from discovering the high cost of living.1 In any case, he never inspected the factories and mines being constructed; and when he went to inspect the White Sea Canal, his trip was announced in the press only days after it had taken place.2 The OGPU had picked up a potential assassin, Yakov Ogarëv, outside the Kremlin in November 1931. Ogarëv, however, had been so surprised by Stalin’s unexpected appearance on Red Square that he failed to pull out his revolver.3 Security concerns alone did not explain Stalin’s withdrawal from view. The fact was that he had set up a political structure which no longer required him to get out and about. Whether in the Kremlin office or at his dachas, he could give his orders and prod his subordinates into carrying them out.

  Political cloistering did nothing to lessen the strains in his family. His son Yakov tried to kill himself in 1929; it was a botched attempt which earned Stalin’s contempt rather than sympathy. Marital relations with Nadya were tense. He was extremely gruff to her and never admitted to fault. Quite possibly Stalin continued to have the odd fling with young communists; and, even if he was faithful to Nadya, she did not always believe him and was driven mad with jealousy. Yet it had never been his way to compromise in personal relationships, least of all with women. Joseph’s attitudes were not the only reason why she got angry. Another factor was her mental condition. Although its precise nature remains unclear, probably it would nowadays be categorised as some kind of schizophrenia. Days of quietude alternated with explosive aggression. Stalin could never be sure what awaited him in the Kremlin flat or at the Zubalovo dacha — and his insensitivity to her plight was driving her to despair. Nadya had always been strong-willed. Stalin had been the love of her life, and, unlike others in her family, she did not have extramarital dalliances. Feeling rejected and underappreciated, she could take it no more in 1926 and decamped to Leningrad, intending to divorce Joseph.4

  Yet she yielded to his pleadings and gave the marriage another try. She wanted no more children; according to her daughter, she had already had two abortions.5 Stalin had not obstructed her from registering as a student at the Industrial Academy. Letters between husband and wife were tender. His routine was established: every summer he would go to the south of the RSFSR. Usually the destination was Sochi on the northeast coast of the Black Sea. Nadya filled her letters with news of the children, the household, the weather and her progress as a student.

  The Stalins decided to consult over her mental condition with foreign medical experts. Since the Treaty of Rapallo in 1922 it had been normal for members of the Soviet elite to go to German clinics and spas. Stalin was one of the few who spurned this privilege; distrusting doctors and disliking foreign countries, he never considered travelling abroad for his healthcare. Georgi Chicherin, his Foreign Affairs Commissar, rebuked him: ‘How good it would be if you, Stalin, were to change your appearance and travel for a certain time abroad with a genuine interpreter rather than a tendentious one. Then you’d see reality!’6 But Stalin approved of Nadya’s trip. No less than his wife, he urgently wanted her to get cured. Even for her, however, permission had to come from on high. The Party Orgburo and Secretariat took from April to July 1930 to process her request, supported by her physicians in Moscow, to spend a month in Germany. The final sanction was signed by Stalin, Molotov, Kaganovich and I. N. Smirnov.7 Stalin arranged for Nadya to send him personal letters through the diplomatic post.8 She met her brother Pavel and his wife Yevgenia on her trip; and after seeing the doctors she returned in time for the start of the Industrial Academy term in September.9

  The medical papers are missing;10 but according to Nadya’s niece Kira Allilueva the diagnosis was a fusion of the cranial seams.11 Joseph wrote affectionate letters to her. Throughout these months — before, during and after her journey — he used the sentimental code they had developed over the years, dropping particular letters from phrases like ‘deep kisses many times’.12

  Her health, though, did not improve. In 1932 she turned to Soviet physicians for advice on what appear to have been abdominal complaints. It has been mooted that they resulted from an earlier abortion.13 What seems to have happened is that a planned surgical operation was postponed on medical grounds. This was what she confided to her Kremlin maid Alexandra Korchagina.14 Nadya fretted as much as ever; and although she made no further attempt to break free from her husband, the marriage remained an unsettled one. He could hardly be bothered with her. In a period where he and his propagandists were touting the importance of films, Joseph did not bestir himself by taking her to the cinema. When he was not drinking with his uncouth comrades, he went on flirting with women. The children brought no solace to Nadya. Severe and demanding, she gave them little of the cuddling normal in other families. Only when they were apart did Joseph and Nadya get back on affectionate terms. This was little comfort for a woman who was expected to give the maximum of psychological support to her husband without ever being able to count on his reciprocation.

  Nadya did not limit her assistance to family matters but also supported him politically. Stories spread that, like her confidant Bukharin, she detested the agricultural collectivisation campaign. In fact she was a wife who jealously guarded her husband’s political position. On 2 May 1931 she wrote to Sergo Ordzhonikidze about Industrial Academy affairs. Her claim was that Stalin’s injunction for the right sort of ‘technical specialists’ to be trained was being ignored. Yet she insisted that her fellow students were not to know and the letter was to be destroyed.15 She was snitching on people in the Industrial Academy in support of the line of the
country’s ruling clique.

  Yet the dual problems of her medical condition and her relationship with Joseph had her on the brink of eruption. The only surprise is that no one properly understood this. Close friends like Tamara Khazanova (by now married to Andrei Andreev) and Molotov’s wife Polina Zhemchuzhina knew of her troubles but failed to understand the depths of her misery. Nadya felt terribly lonely. She found certain kinds of social situation very disturbing. She tended to get distressed when Joseph got together with his cronies and their wives. The ruling group’s tradition was to gather for supper at the Voroshilovs’ Kremlin flat for a celebration of the October Revolution anniversary on 7 November. (Sovnarkom had adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1918, moving the date by thirteen days and thereby changing the month in which the Revolution had taken place.) Always there was excessive drinking and a lot of crude banter. In 1932 Nadya made a special effort to dress up to look her best. It made no difference to Joseph’s behaviour. Late in the evening he flirted with the wife of Alexander Yegorov, who had served with him in the Soviet–Polish War. Natalya Yegorova was wearing a glamorous frock and behaving coquettishly. Apparently he did his crude trick of rolling a bit of bread into a ball and flicking it at her. Nadya was seized with jealousy, and stormed out of the gathering. Witnesses dismissively put this down to her ‘Gipsy blood’.16

  There are other versions of what happened before she left. One story has it that Stalin yelled across at Nadya using the familiar ‘you’ form in Russian and that she took exception to this. Another is that he threw a lighted cigarette at her. But the likeliest version is that he was indeed making eyes at Natalya Yegorova and that Nadya could take it no longer. What happened next is more definitely recorded. Polina Zhemchuzhina ran after her into the cold night air. Nadya was extraordinarily tense and Polina walked her around the Kremlin grounds in an attempt to calm her down. Then Nadya went by herself to the family flat while Polina went back to the party.17