When the new leaders began to release prisoners, their reactions were often similar. Kira Alliluyeva, herself newly released, picked up her mother Zhenya from the Lubianka.
“So finally, Stalin saved us after all!” declared Zhenya.
“You fool!” exclaimed Kira. “Stalin’s dead!” Zhenya admired Stalin up to her death in 1974. Her sister-in-law Anna Redens, like Budyonny’s second wife, Olga, had lost her mind in confinement and never recovered. Vlasik returned broken from prison but he and Poskrebyshev remained friends, both dying in the mid-sixties.
Khrushchev emerged as the dominant leader. Malenkov was removed as Premier and replaced by Bulganin. In 1956, Khrushchev, backed by Mikoyan, famously denounced Stalin’s crimes in his “Secret Speech.” Five years later, Stalin’s body was removed from the Mausoleum and buried in the Kremlin wall.
In 1957, Molotov, Kaganovich and Malenkov, backed by Voroshilov and Bulganin, managed to overthrow Khrushchev in the Presidium. However, Khrushchev mobilized the Central Committee, flying in his supporters in planes organized by Marshal Zhukov.
At a Plenum, Stalin’s murderous magnates scrambled to blame one another for their crimes: “Sleeves rolled up, axe in hand, they lopped off heads,” Zhukov accused them—and Khrushchev himself. Khrushchev attacked Malenkov who replied: “Only you are completely pure, Comrade Khrushchev!” Kaganovich insisted “the whole Politburo signed” the death lists. Khrushchev accused him back but Kaganovich roared: “Didn’t you sign death warrants in Ukraine?” Finally Khrushchev shouted: “All of us taken together aren’t worth Stalin’s shit!” As a recent historian has written, “this was certainly no Nuremberg” but it was the “closest Stalin’s henchmen came to a day of reckoning.” Molotov, Kaganovich and Malenkov were sacked. Kaganovich and Malenkov were despatched to run a potash factory and power station respectively in distant regions. Malenkov’s daughter says her father found this minor job a calming relief; Kaganovich’s grandson reports that “Iron Lazar” immediately discarded his notorious temper and never shouted again, becoming a cosy grandfather.
Molotov became Soviet Ambassador to Mongolia and then, in 1960, Soviet Representative at the UN Atomic Agency in Vienna so that he was present, ignored in the background, when President Kennedy and Khrushchev met there with their delegations in June 1961.
Khrushchev, like Stalin before him, became Premier as well as First Secretary. Marshal Zhukov became Defence Minister as a reward for his help but his pugnacity and fame threatened the increasingly vainglorious Khrushchev who sacked him for “Bonapartism.” By 1960, when the senile Voroshilov retired as President, Khrushchev and Mikoyan were the last of Stalin’s magnates in power. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, it was Mikoyan who flew to Havana, accompanied by his son Sergo, to persuade Castro to agree to Khrushchev’s compromise, and then on to Washington to talk to Kennedy. Mikoyan, who had helped carry Lenin’s coffin, also attended JFK’s funeral.
After the scare of the Missile Crisis and the autocratic folly of his agricultural panaceas, Khrushchev was overthrown in 1964 by a cabal of Stalin’s young stars, Brezhnev, Kosygin and their éminence grise , Suslov, who ruled until their deaths in the eighties. Mikoyan survived even this upheaval and became President, retiring in 1965.
The old magnates found it hard to cope with their fall. They had expected to be arrested so were all relieved to be alive. When they left their apartments in the Kremlin in 1957, Kaganovich and Andreyev found they did not even own their own towels or sheets. Many of them were granted apartments in the palatial Granovsky buildings where the shrewd Molotov managed to secure two apartments as well as a dacha. Kaganovich and Malenkov retired to spartan but large apartments in another building on the Frunze Embankment but avoided each other. These famous and blood-spattered old pensioners spent their retirements writing their memoirs, receiving Stalinist admirers, avoiding the hostile stares of former victims they encountered in the street, applying for readmission to the Party, and shuffling through papers in the Lenin Library: they were non-people but spotting them became a thrilling form of living archaeology.
Happily and lovingly reunited, Molotov and Polina remained un-apologetic Stalinists: Svetlana wrote that visiting them was like entering a “palaeontological museum.” The prickly disdain between Molotov and Kaganovich lasted until their deaths but was as nothing compared to their loathing for Khrushchev. He admitted being “up to his elbows” in the blood of his victims and “that burdens my soul.” He defied his successors by dictating his selectively honest memoirs, dying in 1971. Andreyev died the same year: the commemorative plaque on the wall outside Granovsky makes him the last of Stalin’s butchers to be celebrated. Mikoyan wrote frank but equally selective memoirs until his death in 1978.
Three others survived into another era: while Polina died in 1970, Molotov left his remorseless reminiscences to posterity in conversations with a sympathetic journalist. He survived to see the ascension of Gorbachev, passing away in 1986. Malenkov remained a Stalinist but enjoyed the poetry of Mandelstam and rediscovered the Christian faith of his childhood that may have been a sort of repentance. In 1988, he was buried beneath a cross and the (utterly inappropriate) statue of the “lion of justice,” sculpted by his grandson. Kaganovich, ever the most cautious and pusillanimous, outlived everyone to witness the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union that he had helped build, dying in 1991.
Their families have enjoyed mixed fortunes and take very different views of Stalin and their parents’ roles: most became editors, architects or scientists. Vasily Stalin was sent to prison, released, remarried and finally died tragically of alcoholism in 1962. His son Alexander, who uses his mother’s name, is a respected theatrical designer in Moscow but his two children by Marshal Timoshenko’s daughter both died young—of alcoholism. Svetlana Alliluyeva defected and returned to Russia and then left again, married an American by whom she had a daughter, lived in Harvard and Cambridge, made and lost a fortune with her beautifully written memoirs, finally found herself without means in sheltered housing in Bristol, England, and is now living alone in obscurity in the American Midwest. Having embraced liberalism and rejected Stalinism, she has displayed both her father’s intelligence and his paranoia. Her Russian children, Joseph Morozov and Katya Zhdanova, are both doctors in Russia.
Yury Zhdanov remarried and returned to academia, becoming Rector of Rostov-on-Don University where he still lives as an honoured professor emeritus, admirer of Stalin and defender of his father. Artyom Sergeev remained in the military, rose to Lieutenant-General and lives outside Moscow. The rest of the Alliluyev family remains close: Kira Alliluyeva worked as an actress and is as irrepressible today as she was when she refused to climb under Stalin’s billiard table in 1937.
Stepan Mikoyan flourished as a test pilot and also rose to Lieutenant-General. His younger brother Sergo edited a magazine on Latin America. Both live in Moscow. Kaganovich’s daughter Maya married and had children and cared for her father in old age, only outliving him for a few years.
Sergo Beria and Martha Peshkova were released and moved to Kiev with Beria’s widow Nina, who never stopped loving her husband. In 1965, Martha divorced Sergo who continued to work as a missile scientist under his mother’s name, Gegechkori. Shortly before his death in 2000, he published his memoirs and appealed to the Russian Supreme Court to rehabilitate his father. The Court upheld the trumped-up charges against Beria. Martha, who has kept her looks, still lives in her large dacha on the old estate of her grandfather, Gorky. Beria’s charming grandchildren, who use the Peshkov name, are an interior decorator, an art academic and an electronics expert.
Lilya Drozhdova, Beria’s “last love,” never betrayed him. She lives in Moscow and, in her early sixties, remains beautiful.
Budyonny’s third wife still lives in his apartment on Granovsky filled with life-sized paintings of the Marshal on horseback. The apartments there are now worth over a million dollars so that the Molotovs rent out theirs to American investment bankers, perhaps
proving right Stalin’s suspicions of Vyacheslav’s “Rightist” tendencies. Molotov’s grandson Vyacheslav Nikonov was one of the leading liberals of 1991, who helped open up the KGB archives and became one of President Yeltsin’s top advisers, serving on his re-election team in 1996. He now runs one of Moscow’s most respected political think tanks and is writing his grandfather’s biography.
Perhaps Stalin was right about the Mikoyans too: Anastas’s grandson Stas became a Soviet rock star, set up his own record label during the nineties and is now the leading Russian rock impresario, their Richard Branson. Beria’s hope that his grandchildren would study at Oxford was not realized but his great-grandson has just left the English public school Rugby and now mixes easily in London high society. Malenkov’s daughter Volya, an architect, followed her father’s later religious journey to become a builder of churches in her old age: her business cards feature pictures of the churches she has built. She and her brothers, both professors of science, remained convinced of their father’s innocence.
Stalin’s confidant Candide Charkviani survived to see an independent Georgia in 1991 and wrote his unpublished memoirs. His son Gela served as the chief political adviser to President Shevardnadze from 1992 to his overthrow in 2003.
To this day, the friendships and feuds of Stalin’s reign survive among the children of the magnates. The families of the grandees who remained in power, Mikoyans, Khrushchevs and Budyonnys, are regarded as a Soviet aristocracy even now. Nina Budyonny, still a Stalinist, is best friends with Julia Khrushcheva, who is not. The friendship of Marshals Budyonny and Zhukov is enjoyed not only by their daughters but by their grandchildren too. Stepan Mikoyan remains friends with Natasha Andreyeva even though the former is a liberal, the latter a diehard Stalinist. Artyom Sergeev remains in contact with those close pals, Nadya Vlasik and Natasha Poskrebysheva. But the Malenkovs and Andreyevs still despise Khrushchev.
It is only natural that all defend their fathers’ parts in the Terror. The Khrushchevs and Mikoyans have the courage and decency to admit the truth, reflecting their fathers’ attempts to correct the worst of Stalin’s (and their own) atrocities. Nonetheless, many of the magnates’ children still enthusiastically defend the Terror and many prefer to blame Beria for Stalin’s own crimes.
Martha Peshkova, who was brought up with Gorky in Sorrento, who still believes her grandfather and father were murdered, who as a child played with Stalin, reflects that “Stalin was as clever as he was cruel. Politics in Stalin’s time was like a closed jar with intriguers fighting one another to the death. What a frightening time! But if Beria had had his way after Stalin, he’d have improved the lifestyle of the country and we’d probably have avoided the destruction and poverty of today!”
Vladimir Alliluyev (Redens), whose father was shot on Stalin’s orders and whose mother lost her mind in his prisons, insists he was a “great man with good and bad sides.” Natasha Poskrebysheva, whose mother was shot by Stalin, admires him enormously and claims to be his daughter. Natasha Andreyeva, who lives in straitened circumstances in an apartment filled with her father’s art deco Kremlin furniture, remains the most aggressively Stalinist. “I have inherited my mother’s intuition,” she warned this author during his interview for this book. “I can see an Enemy by their eyes. Are you an Enemy? Are you afraid of the Red Flag?” She still supports the Terror: “We had to destroy spies before the war.” Despite the bulging file chronicling her father’s murderous spree in 1937, she asserts his innocence and claims, “Khrushchev’s dirty hands killed far more in Ukraine!” The “system,” not Stalin, were to blame for any “mistakes,” Andreyeva concludes. “But you Western capitalists have killed many more in Russia with your AIDS than Stalin ever did!”
Those who lived the extraordinary, terrible and privileged life as a child of Stalin’s grandees remain linked together and it is no surprise that their attitudes defy time—and the fate of their own families. The passionately optimistic ideals of Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism and the imperial triumphs of the Generalissimo’s armies remain as potent and persuasive as the presence of Stalin himself, of whom they are never free. Old Molotov was asked if he dreamed about Stalin: “Not often but sometimes. The circumstances are very unusual. I’m in some sort of destroyed city and I can’t find a way out. Afterwards, I meet HIM...”1
Endnotes
1 The Soviet secret police was first called the Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counterrevolution and Sabotage, known as the Cheka. In 1922, it became the State Political Administration (GPU) then the United GPU: OGPU. In 1934, it was subsumed into the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD). However, secret policemen were still known as “Chekists” and the secret police itself as “the Organs.” In 1941 and 1943, State Security was separated into its own Commissariat, the NKGB. In 1954, it became a Committee of State Security, the KGB.
2 She certainly cared for Stalin like a good baba: “Stalin has to have a chicken diet,” she wrote to President Kalinin in 1921. “We’ve only been allocated 15 chickens . . . Please raise the quota since it’s only halfway through the month and we’ve only got 5 left . . .”
3 The Poteshny Palace, where the Stalins lived, means “Amusement Palace” since it once housed actors and a theatre maintained by the Tsars.
4 One of the few attractive traditions of Bolshevism was the adoption of the children of fallen heroes and ordinary orphans. Stalin adopted Artyom when the child’s father, a famous revolutionary, was killed in 1921 and his mother was ill. Similarly, Mikoyan adopted the sons of Sergei Shaumian, the hero of Baku; Voroshilov adopted the son of Mikhail Frunze, the War Commissar who died suspiciously in 1925. Later, both Kaganovich and Yezhov, harsh men indeed, adopted orphans.
5 She became director of a gramophone factory from which she was sacked many years later for taking bribes. She lived until 1998 but never spoke about her short friendship with Stalin.
6 Another of his sweethearts was a young Party activist, Tatiana Slavotinskaya. The warmth of his love letters from exile increased in proportion to his material needs: “Dearest darling Tatiana Alexandrovna,” he wrote in December 1913, “I received your parcel but you really didn’t need to buy new undergarments . . . I don’t know how to repay you, my darling sweetheart!”
7 This was not lost on another peasant boy who was born only a few hundred miles from Gori: Saddam Hussein. A Kurdish leader, Mahmoud Osman, who negotiated with him, observed that Saddam’s study and bedroom were filled with books on Stalin. Today, Stalin’s birthplace, the hut in Gori, is embraced magnificently by a white-pillared marble temple built by Lavrenti Beria and remains the centrepiece of Stalin Boulevard, close to the Stalin Museum.
8 I am grateful to Gela Charkviani for sharing with me the unpublished but fascinating manuscript of the memoirs of his father, Candide Charkviani, First Secretary of the Georgian Party, 1938–1951. In old age, Stalin spent hours telling Charkviani about his childhood. Charkviani writes that he tried to find Beso’s grave in the Tiflis cemetery but could not. He found photographs meant to show Beso and asked Stalin to identify him, but Stalin stated that these did not show his father. It is therefore unlikely that the usual photograph said to show Beso is correct. On Stalin’s paternity, the Egnatashvili family emphatically deny that the innkeeper was Stalin’s father.
9 The son Konstantin Kuzakov enjoyed few privileges except that it is said that during the Purges, when he came under suspicion, he appealed to his real father who wrote “Not to be touched” on his file—but that may be simply because he was the son of a woman who was kind to Stalin in exile. In 1995, after a successful career as a television executive, Kuzakov, in an article headed “Son of Stalin,” announced: “I was still a child when I learned I was Stalin’s son.” There was almost certainly another child from a later exile.
10 The recent Secret File of Stalin by Roman Brackman claims the entire Terror was Stalin’s attempt to wipe out anyone with knowledge of his duplicity. Yet there were many reasons for the Terror, though
Stalin’s character was a major cause. Stalin liquidated many of those who had known him in the early days, yet he mysteriously preserved others. He also killed over a million victims who had no knowledge of his early life. However, Brackman also gives an excellent account of the intrigues and betrayals of underground life.
11 Stalin later seemed to confirm the story of the sinking barge in a fascinating letter to Voroshilov: “The summer after the assassination attempt on Lenin we . . . made a list of officers whom we gathered in the Manege . . . to shoot en masse . . . So the Tsaritsyn barge was the result not of the struggle against military specialists but momentum from the centre . . .” Five future Second World War marshals fought at Tsaritsyn: in ascending competence—Kulik, Voroshilov, Budyonny, Timoshenko and Zhukov (though the latter fought there in 1919 after Stalin’s departure).
12 Stalin was never the titular Head of State of the Soviet Union, nor was Lenin. Kalinin’s title was the Chairman of the Central Executive Committee, technically the highest legislative body, but he was colloquially the “President.” After the 1936 Constitution, his title was Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet. Only with the Brezhnev Constitution did the Secretary-General of the Party add the Presidency to his titles. The Bolsheviks coined a new jargon of acronyms in their effort to create a new sort of government. People’s Commissars (Narodny Komissar ) were known as Narkoms. The government or Council (Soviet) of People’s Commissars was known as Sovnarkom.
13 Stalin’s row with Lenin’s wife, Krupskaya, outraged Lenin’s bourgeois sentiments. But Stalin thought it was entirely consistent with Party culture: “Why should I stand on my hind legs for her? To sleep with Lenin does not mean you understand Marxism-Leninism. Just because she used the same toilet as Lenin...” This led to some classic Stalin jokes, in which he warned Krupskaya that if she did not obey, the Central Committee would appoint someone else as Lenin’s wife. That is a very Bolshevik concept. His disrespect for Krupskaya was probably not helped by her complaints about Lenin’s flirtations with his assistants, including Yelena Stasova, the one whom Stalin threatened to promote to “wife.”
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