Stalin: A Biography

by Robert Service

  Nadya’s thoughts plunged into existential darkness. Some years previously her brother had made her the present of a gun; despite looking like a toy pistol (as Stalin later recalled), it was a lethal weapon.18 Seating herself on the bed, she pointed it at her heart and shot herself. Her corpse was found by the morning maid. The panicking household staff made a call to Abel Enukidze. As Central Committee member and administrator of the Kremlin site, he would have the authority to decide on appropriate action. As it happened, Enukidze was also Nadya’s godfather.19 Without hesitation he ordered that Stalin should be roused. The Stalins had taken to sleeping in separate rooms and Joseph was seemingly unaware of the consequences of his misbehaviour the night before. Doctors were summoned to ascertain the cause of death. This was not going to be a lengthy task: Nadya had shot herself through the heart. When Professors Rozanov and Kushner carried out the postmortem after midday, the body was laid out on the bed. Near by was the small revolver. Death must have been instantaneous and, they concluded, had occurred eight to ten hours previously. Nadya had taken her own life. Rozanov and Kushner started to write their brief report at one o’clock.

  The politicians were deciding what to reveal to the public.20 It was thought inappropriate to tell the truth for fear of diminishing Stalin’s prestige. Instead Pravda was asked to state that Nadya had died of the effects of appendicitis. Wives of the most prominent leaders signed a letter of condolence to Stalin. This too was published in the newspaper. A funeral commission was selected, headed by Abel Enukidze. There was to be a cortège behind a horse-drawn carriage carrying her coffin. The mourners would gather on Red Square at three o’clock in the afternoon on 12 November and would walk across the city to the Novodevichi Monastery Cemetery. Such occasions were cause for official concern, and the OGPU was put in charge of the organisation and security of the proceedings. Orchestras were to be supplied by the OGPU and the Red Army. A short ceremony was to take place at the graveside. There would be two speakers: Kaganovich as Moscow City Committee Party Secretary and Kalashnikov, a representative from the Industrial Academy where she had been studying.21 Stalin left the details to others. His public appearance on the day of the funeral was going to be an ordeal, and he did not volunteer to give a eulogy before the coffin was interred.

  Despite what many subsequently suggested, he attended the ceremony. The cortège of mourners made its way on foot through the city. It was a day without snow. Crowds lined the streets. At the cemetery the open coffin was taken from the carriage and lowered into the hard earth. Kaganovich’s oration briefly mentioned the deceased and ended with a request that communist party members should carry out the duties falling to them as a consequence of Stalin’s personal loss. Kalashnikov gave a eulogy to Nadya as a fine and dedicated student.22 The funeral was over within minutes. Stalin and his comrades returned by limousine to the Kremlin. A simple tombstone was erected over Nadya’s grave, where it remains to this day.

  When the Industrial Academy approached Stalin for permission to examine her working materials, he immediately consented and asked Anna Allilueva, Nadya’s sister, to expedite this. Not for Stalin the usual possessiveness of the widower. He told Anna to inspect the safe with the assistance of Tamara Khazanova.23 Nadya’s daughter Svetlana was to claim that a suicide note was left behind; but Svetlana learned only many years later that her mother had died by her own hand, and her memoirs are anyway not always reliable. It anyway can hardly be assumed that such a note would necessarily explain everything. What is clear is that the official clampdown on information in 1932 served only to feed the growth of rumours. In diplomatic circles it was bruited that she had committed suicide.24 Gossip was intense within the walls of the Kremlin. This was dangerous activity. Alexandra Korchagina, the maid of Joseph and Nadya, was denounced by other Kremlin domestic staff for saying that Stalin had killed her; she was sentenced to three years’ corrective labour on the White Sea–Baltic Canal. Korchagina claimed that it was her own denouncers who had made such a statement about Stalin.25 The denouncers themselves were arrested in the 1935 clear-out of Kremlin auxiliary staff.26

  Indisputably Stalin was deeply shaken. ‘I was a bad husband,’ he admitted to Molotov: ‘I never had time to take her to the cinema.’27 This was hardly a full recognition of the scale of assistance he would have needed to give Nadya. But it signalled a degree of remorse. Significantly it also implied that circumstances, rather than his own demeanour, determined his contribution to the tragedy. He was also thinking as much about himself as about his deceased wife. His self-centredness grew. Within a few weeks he was blaming her directly and worrying about the fate of their children. The attempt on his own life by young Yakov Dzhughashvili came back to mind, and at a dinner with his friends he blurted out: ‘How could Nadya, who so much condemned Yasha for such a step, go off and shoot herself? She did a very bad thing: she made a cripple out of me.’ Alexander Svanidze, his brother-in-law by his first marriage, tried to mollify him by asking how she could leave her two children motherless. Stalin was angry: ‘Why the children? They forgot her within a few days: it’s me she made a cripple for life!’ But then he proposed: ‘Let’s drink to Nadya!’28

  Steadily he came to take a less charitable view of Nadya’s suicide:29

  The children grew up without their mother, that was the trouble. Nannies, governesses — however ideal they might have been — could not replace their mother for them. Ah, Nadya, Nadya, what did you do and how much I and the children needed you!

  He focused his thoughts on the harm done to the children and, above all, to himself. Sinking into introspection, he confided in no one. He told the children that their mother had died of natural causes. Tough and icy though he was in outward behaviour, Stalin’s inner mood was touchy.

  For some weeks there were worries that he too might do away with himself. He was pale and inattentive to his daily needs. His characteristic earthy sense of humour disappeared. It was weeks before he started to pull himself around. Seeking companionship, he turned to his Politburo associates. Kirov was a particular chum. Whenever Kirov was on a trip from Leningrad, he went to see the Ordzhonikidzes; but frequently Stalin called him over to his place and Kirov slept there overnight.30 Mikoyan was also frequently invited. This caused embarrassment for Mikoyan, whose wife Ashken was not easily persuaded that he really was staying where he said. Soon Mikoyan had to start declining Stalin’s requests, and Stalin turned to Alexander Svanidze.31 He sorely needed the reassurance and company of familiar individuals. The Soviet Union’s ruler was a lonely widower. According to Lazar Kaganovich, he was never the same man again. He turned in on himself and hardened his attitude to people in general.32 He drank and ate more, sometimes sitting at the table for three or four hours after putting in a full day in his office.33

  Yet he did not yet take things out on the family and friends of his late wife. (That came later.) The Alliluevs tried to stay in touch with him without presuming too much upon his time and convenience. Nadya’s father Sergei wrote to him to ask whether he might still go and stay at the Zubalovo dacha. He was in poor health and hoped to convalesce in the countryside.34 The request, written two months after Nadya’s death, tugged Stalin out of his self-absorption. Indeed it exasperated him: ‘Sergei! You’re a strange person! What sort of “permission” do you need when you have the full right to come and reside in “Zubalovo” without any “permission”!’35 He welcomed other members of the Alliluev family, and Yevgenia — Nadya’s sister-in-law — made efforts to see that he had a social life. The Svanidzes too popped by to see him whenever they could. Blood ran thicker than water both for Stalin and them.

  Yet Zubalovo offered reminders of his married years. Another dacha outside Moscow seemed a sensible idea, and Stalin discovered an architect with ideas he found congenial. Miron Merzhanov designed country houses with thick, gloomy walls as if they were intended to stand as impregnable fortresses. Without Nadya to dissuade him, Stalin commissioned a residence serving better as a work place than as a
family home. A rural spot was found near Kuntsevo, west of Moscow. It was only seven miles from the Kremlin and could be reached within minutes by official limousine. Stalin got the dacha he wanted. There was a large hall for meetings as well as several bedrooms and rooms for afternoon tea, billiards and film-shows. The construction was complete by 1934; Stalin quickly set himself up there and ceased to sleep in the Kremlin flat. The dacha became known as Blizhnyaya (‘Nearby Dacha’). Another was built further out and called Dalnyaya (‘Distant Dacha’), but Blizhnyaya was his favourite. Merzhanov had to be patient with his patron. No sooner had Blizhnyaya gone up than Stalin demanded alterations, even to the extent of requiring a second storey to be added.36 He was forever thinking of ways to make the little rural castle into his dream.

  His was a restless and unhappy spirit. Although he lived by choice apart from his family, he was not comfortable with being on his own; and Moscow, where he had spent most years of his second marriage, was never going to allow him to forget the past. He looked forward keenly to his vacations in the south. Although he and Nadya had holidayed there together, her student obligations had latterly kept her in Moscow. State dachas already existed along the coast between Sochi and Sukhum, and Merzhanov was kept busy with commissions to design new ones.

  Nearly all Stalin’s vacations after 1932 took place in Abkhazia. Although he lived alone in the various local dachas, he spent his time convivially. The wine flowed and his tables groaned with food. His boon companion was Nestor Lakoba. In the factional disputes of the 1920s Lakoba had kept the Communist Party of Georgia clear of oppositionist influence. He had fought in the Civil War and was a crack shot with a hunting rifle; it amused Stalin that Lakoba put the Red Army commanders to shame when they went out hunting in the mountains.37 Lakoba, moreover, had been an orphan and — like Stalin — had had a difficult childhood; and he too had studied at the Tiflis Spiritual Academy.38 He was a bluff Caucasian who saw to it that Stalin was given the leisure to enjoy the delights of the Caucasus: the scenery, the wildlife, the wines and the cuisine. Even when Stalin stayed in Sochi, over the Abkhazian border in the RSFSR, Lakoba would come to visit. In 1936 when Lakoba got into political trouble with higher party authority in the Transcaucasian Federation and was stripped of the right to leave Sukhum without permission, Stalin was furious. Whatever might be the local political intrigues, he wanted the company of Nestor Lakoba.39

  The first holiday after Nadya’s death was memorable in more ways than one. On 23 September 1933 Stalin and his bodyguards took a boat trip off Sukhum. Suddenly they were subjected to rifle fire from the coast. His chief bodyguard Nikolai Vlasik threw himself on top of Stalin to protect him and requested permission to return fire. Meanwhile the boatman steered away from the area. The immediate assumption was that this had been an attempt at assassination; but the truth turned out to be more mundane. The Abkhazian NKVD had been suspicious of a boat which did not come from the locality and assumed that foreigners were up to no good. The coastguards owned up and pleaded for mercy, and Stalin recommended that they should suffer only disciplinary measures. (In the Great Terror the case was dug up and they were either shot or sent to forced-labour camps.)40

  Stalin’s power and eminence attracted attention from politicians in the south Caucasus. His presence was a heaven-sent opportunity to impress him. Among those who yearned to be taken up by Stalin was Lavrenti Beria. In 1933 he was First Secretary of the Party Transcaucasian Committee and one bright summer’s morning found an excuse to visit Stalin before breakfast at a Black Sea dacha. Beria was too late. Stalin was already down in the bushes below the buildings and, when Beria caught his first glimpse of him, he saw to his chagrin that Stalin was accompanied by Lakoba. Not that this inhibited Beria from toadying. After breakfast Stalin remarked: ‘That wild bush needs clearing out, it gets in the way of the garden.’ But efforts to remove the roots failed until Beria, snatching an axe off a Muscovite visitor, applied himself. Beria made sure Stalin heard him saying: ‘I can chop under the roots of any bush which the owner of this garden, Joseph Vissarionovich, might point to.’41 He was almost volunteering himself as a purger for Stalin. Few of these convivial encounters were without political content. Stalin, even on holiday, could not insulate himself from the ambitions of intriguers.

  Yet most of his visitors were party and government functionaries of the region. No one, not even Molotov or Kaganovich, was a chum as Kirov had been; and Lakoba was more like a seasonal landlord than a genuine intimate. Having put up barricades against psychological intrusion, Stalin restricted himself to playful recreation. He took nieces and nephews on his knee. He sang Orthodox liturgical chants by the piano. He went hunting, challenged visitors to games of billiards and welcomed the presence of female relatives. But he had got harder as a personality. Ice had entered his soul. Molotov and Kaganovich, who immensely admired him, could not work out what made him tick. They later said that he changed a lot after Nadya’s death. But the same works emphasise what made him exceptional: will power, clarity of vision, endurance and courage. Always Molotov and Kaganovich were observing him from the outside. They were in awe of Stalin. While they too were wilful and determined, they appreciated someone who had these qualities to a unique level of intensity. When he acted oddly, they gave him the benefit of the doubt. They thought he had earned the right to any psychological peculiarity by the services he had rendered to the USSR.

  Most of them until the late 1930s felt no reason to query the mental condition of their Leader. Doubtless Stalin had previously driven them to distraction with orders to intensify political and economic campaigns. Yet the policies had been those of the ascendant party leadership and the negative side of Stalin’s personality was largely overlooked. Earlier acquaintances had been more perceptive. Fellow pupils in Gori and Tbilisi as well as many party comrades before 1917 had remarked on his hypertrophied sense of importance and his excessive tendency to take offence. And when Lenin used him as Political Commissar in the Civil War or as Party General Secretary, he knew that Stalin would need careful handling if his volatility and crudity were not to damage the interests of the Revolution. Then in the early 1930s Stalin started to demand capital punishment for his adversaries in the communist party. If Nadya’s suicide changed him, it was only to push him down a road he had been travelling his whole life long.

  27. MODERNITY’S SORCERER

  Stalin and his associates aimed to turn the USSR into an industrial and military megalith. They were militants. They wrestled to change society from top to bottom. They fought for ‘cultural revolution’. Their campaign, as they saw it, required the entire syndrome of attitudes and behaviour in the country to be transformed in the spirit of the Enlightenment in general and Marxism in particular. War was waged upon customary ideas. Religion was to be eradicated and nationalist affiliations dissolved. The intelligentsia in the arts and sciences was to be battered into submission or else discarded. The objective was for communism to become the generally accepted ideology and for Stalin’s variant of Marxism–Leninism to be installed as its core. He had not suddenly discovered this inclination. In the 1920s he had urged that young communists be trained to take up positions of authority and spread the party’s ideas.1 The entire generation of Bolshevik veterans shared his standpoint. They believed that the achievement of socialism required a fundamental rupture with the old society and the elites who had formed opinions in it.

  Stalin, like every communist, insisted that culture was not confined to the poems of Pushkin but covered literacy, numeracy, hygiene, shelter, food, conscientiousness and efficiency. There was an almost religious ecstasy in the political sermons he and his fellow leaders delivered on the ‘cultural front’. Writers were designated as ‘engineers of human souls’. His Marxist faith was fused with a warlike spirit. No one underestimated the difficulties of the campaign as Stalin urged the cultural combatants to rise to the task in hand. At the Seventeenth Party Congress in January–February 1934 he declared that fierce battles still lay ahe
ad:2

  The enemies of the party, opportunists of all colours, national-deviationists of every kind have been crushed. But the remains of their ideology live on in the heads of individual party members and often give evidence of their existence… And the soil for such inclinations undoubtedly exists in our country if only because we still have intermediate strata of the population in town and countryside who represent a nutritive environment for such inclinations.

  Fervour and pugnacity were demanded: Stalin had begun a war he was determined to win.

  Most observers have assumed that his ultimate aim was merely to ‘catch up’ with the West. This is to underestimate his purposes. He had a much more comprehensive project, and the atmosphere of his rule, which engendered much popular enthusiasm, is incomprehensible without that project. When Stalin spoke about the need for the introduction of ‘modernity’ (sovremennost’) to the USSR, what he had in mind was something more than blind imitation of the advanced capitalist countries. Soviet-style modernity in his estimation would be of an altogether superior kind.

  He and the rest of the Politburo were Marxist believers. The utopian strain in their thought was to the fore in the early 1930s; they thought that Soviet modernity would raise humanity to a higher plane of existence not just by eliminating the bad old traditions in Russia but also by doing things unparalleled in the West. Unemployment had already been eradicated and soon the gap in material conditions between town and countryside would be closed.3 Universal provision of food, shelter, education and healthcare would be guaranteed. Bolsheviks had always claimed that capitalism was an inherently wasteful economic system in comparison with socialism. Marx and Lenin had written that industrialists and bankers inevitably developed an interest in doing down competitors and in blocking technological advance at the expense of popular aspirations and requirements. Resources were not going to be unproductively expended in Stalin’s USSR. A virtue was claimed for the standardisation of products and services. The higher good was the principle of common availability. Stalin was hostile, at least in public, to the maintenance of manufacturing sub-sectors dedicated to luxury goods. Individualisation of choice was consciously downplayed. The priority was for the ‘new Soviet person’ to accept the obligations of membership of ‘the collective’.