Stalin

by Edvard Radzinsky

  The former royal residences, and the palaces of the aristocracy, which Lenin in a special decree had generously presented to the toiling masses, soon passed into the hands of the new tsar and the new aristocracy. Stalin would be assigned the royal family’s favorite palace, at Livadia in the Crimea; Molotov’s holiday home would be the luxurious palace of Count Vorontsov. (In fact, the Boss made use of his palace only once: he preferred to take his holidays in one of the many government dachas in his native Caucasus.) Stalin was, however, careful to keep up appearances: all the luxuries with which he finally corrupted and demoralized the Party remained state property Once he removed them from the Olympus of state power, former grandees and their families counted for nothing. The daughter of the once mighty Kaganovich told me that when her father was dismissed after Stalin’s death the family was amazed to discover that they did not even possess any furniture of their own—everything belonged to the state. This system helped to make the Boss’s henchmen zealous in his service.

  In those years the Boss chose as his new main residence a government villa built at Kuntsevo, a suburb of Moscow, and called the “nearer dacha.” He left his children, Vasya and Svetlana, at his former dacha in Zubalovo, where he used to spend the summer with Nadya. This was also the home of Nadya’s parents, the Alliluyevs, and several of her relatives were regular visitors—her brother Pavel and his wife, Zhenya (whose relationship with Stalin was “observed” by Maria Svanidze), her half-crazy brother Fyodor, her sister Anna (pet name Nyura), who was married to a pillar of the secret police called Redens. Other visitors included the Svanidze couple, Maria and Alyosha, relatives of the Boss’s first wife, and his older son Yakov.

  After work the Boss always returned to his Kremlin apartment. But, as Svetlana would write later in her memoirs, he now always left to spend the night at the nearer dacha. The apartment evidently held too many memories of Nadezhda and of that fatal night.

  ALYOSHA, MARIA, AND JOSEPH

  His private life at this time seemed likely to remain a secret, and a source of legend. There was, however, one chronicler—a witness who enables us to catch a glimpse of this most secretive of human beings at home. Maria Svanidze.

  Maria Svanidze was then in her forties (she was born in 1889). And she was more or less in love with Stalin.

  Her husband, Alyosha Svanidze, was the brother of Stalin’s first wife. Svetlana Alliluyeva describes “Uncle Alyosha” as “a handsome Georgian of the Svanetian type, a short fair-haired man with blue eyes and an aquiline nose. He had received a European education at German universities, paid for by the Party.” Maria, a Jewish beauty, was a singer in the Tiflis opera company. She was already in her thirties when she divorced her first husband and married Alyosha. They had a son, to whom they gave the ultrarevolutionary name Dzhonrid (John Reed) in honor of the famous American Communist. Svanidze had worked in Georgia as head of the republic’s Finance Ministry in Budu Mdivani’s government.

  In Moscow Maria saw a great deal of Nadya Stalin. Alyosha even wrote to his wife in care of Stalin’s apartment. Maria was very fond of Nadya. A year after Nadya’s death she wrote, “Now she’s no longer with us, but her family and her home are dear to me. I went to see Nyura Redens [Nadya’s sister Anna] yesterday. Pavel was there, and Zhenya … but it wasn’t the same. I feel very lonely without Nadya.”

  She did, however, often visit the house which seemed so empty after Nadya’s death. It was there that she “observed” Joseph and Zhenya. And all this time she kept up her diary. Many pages have been torn out. Did Maria destroy them herself in that terrible year 1937? Or did the diary’s hero take the trouble to do it, when the diary came his way after Maria’s arrest?

  But all this was in the future. For the time being the Svanidzes belonged to the innermost circle of Stalin’s friends. He called them Alyosha and Masha, they called him Joseph. Svetlana Alliluyeva described the Svanidzes as an ideal couple. But you need only read the diary to realize that the two Georgian revolutionaries had more in common than most friends. Alyosha’s European veneer also concealed the fiery temperament of a barbarian. An entry in the diary, from 1923, the year in which the Svanidzes married, reads: “I cried bitterly after that wild scene of jealousy, and he sat on the edge of the bed beside me: ‘It’s all because we love each other, you know.… All the unpleasantness is over now’ and he became so affectionate. When he makes jealous scenes it isn’t so much because he’s hurt and is suffering as because, according to him, I don’t know how to behave … and my conduct is very bad when men are present.” And an entry on March 30, 1934: “Why do I have to live with a man who hates and despises me, and why does he have to live with a woman who out of grief, despair, and resentment sometimes wishes him dead? But afterward, life together somehow becomes livable for a time, and you start clinging to it.… Of course, my age is more to blame … and the fear of poverty (absolutely beyond all reason in my case), and then again I want to say to hell with it all, I’m not going to sell myself … it’s a vicious circle.… I’m badly wounded, my heart bleeds … I have to sort it out somehow … or it will all end tragically. I haven’t been seeing anyone lately, except the Alliluyevs.”

  That was how things were between them. She sensed how much her adoration of Joseph upset Alyosha. But how severely she punished him by flaunting her adoration: “30.7.34. On July 28 J. [Joseph] left for Sochi. Because of Alyosha I couldn’t see him before he left. I was vexed. For the last two months Alyosha has persistently deprived me of his company, which I find so interesting.”

  THE LADY OF THE HOUSE

  Maria described the strange family which Joseph established after Nadya’s death. Little Svetlana was made “lady of the house” in place of her dead mother. From her he received at last what he had always wanted—unquestioning adoration. Her love expressed itself in a strange way. She used to give him written orders! The man to whom no one else dared give orders. It was a game which he took very seriously; he was a genuinely loving father. From Maria’s diary:

  Svetlana hung around her father the whole time. He petted her, kissed her, admired her, lovingly gave her the choicest morsels from his plate. She wrote him “Order No. 4”: he must allow her to spend holidays at Lipid—one of his dachas was there.… After dinner he was in a good humor. He went to the private intercity telephone, rang Kirov, and shared a joke with him.… He advised him to come to Moscow immediately, to defend Leningrad’s interest.… Joseph loves Kirov, and … suddenly wanted to see him, so that they could steam themselves in a Russian bathhouse and play the fool together. Around 10 he got ready to go out of town with the children, complained that he was short of sleep, and obviously intended to catch up on his sleep when he got to the dacha.… We stayed on with Karolina Vasilievna (the housekeeper, she’s been with them eight years), and talked about the children, about his son Vasya, he’s doing badly at school, exploits his name and his father’s position, is rude to all adults, including his teacher, it would, she said, be a blow to J. if he got to know all the details. He gets tired and wants peace and comfort at home.… Nadya made great efforts to bring up the children austerely, but since her death, everything’s gone to rack and ruin.… Joseph and I said goodbye for an indefinite period.… He is kind and warmhearted.

  14.11.34. At 6:00 P.M. J[oseph] arrived with Vasya and Kirov. The little girls gave us a puppet show. J. said, “I’ve never seen anything so beautiful.” He was smoking his pipe. He invited us to go with him to the nearer dacha, but as he had said earlier that he was going there to work, Zhenya and I didn’t respond to his invitation. Sometimes he invites people simply out of courtesy Svetlana wrote an order: “I order you to allow me to go to the theater or the cinema with you.” And signed it “Svetlana, Mistress of the House.” She handed it to him, and J. said: “Oh well. I must obey.” They’ve been playing that game for a year now. Svetlana is the Mistress of the House, and she has several secretaries. Papa is No. 1 secretary, then come Molotov, Kaganovich, Ordzhonikidze, Kirov, and a few others. She
is great friends with Kirov, because J. is on very good and close terms with him. Svetlana writes orders and pins them on the wall with drawing pins.

  He was friends with Kirov. His friendship was genuine. And he was getting ready to murder him. Maria wrote: “He invited us (Alyosha and me) out to the nearer dacha.… He was a little irritable with the servants at supper.… We went home at 2:30, leaving him alone in that enormous house. My heart aches when I think of his loneliness.”

  Without Kirov he would be absolutely alone. But …

  14

  THE CONGRESS OF VICTORS

  APOTHEOSIS

  But there was no other way. That is what he must surely have said to himself early in 1934, after the famous Seventeenth Congress, which was to have marked the consummation of his triumph over his shattered foes.

  It had all gone well to begin with. In his official report, accompanied by never-ending ovations from the hall, he had proudly declared that “whereas at the Fifteenth Congress we were still having to argue for the correctness of the Party line, and to do battle with certain anti-Leninist groups, and at the Sixteenth Congress finish off the last adherents of those groups, at this Congress … there is no one to fight.… Everybody sees that the Party line is victorious, the policy of industrialization is victorious … the policy of liquidation of the kulaks, and total collectivization is victorious.… Our country’s experience has shown that the victory of socialism in a single country is perfectly possible.”

  After this, yesterday’s oppositionists strove as never before to outdo each other in penitential eulogies. From Bukharin: “Stalin was entirely right when by brilliant deployment of Marxist-Leninist dialectic he utterly demolished several of the assumptions of the right deviationists, for which I was mainly responsible.… After the former leaders of the rightists had acknowledged their errors … resistance from the enemies of the Party found its expression in various small groups, which slipped with gathering speed headlong down the slope to counterrevolution. The remnants of the opposition within the Party were just the same—among them several of my former pupils, who were deservedly punished.” And from Tomsky: “Comrade Stalin was the most consistent and the most brilliant of Lenin’s pupils.… He saw farthest, and he most consistently led the Party along the correct Leninist path.”

  Such fulsome praise, all from the mouths of his former foes. Pyatakov, Sokolnikov, the list seems endless. And who first thought of the progressive combination “Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin”? Not Molotov, not Kaganovich. Zinoviev. The whole country heard the October leaders acknowledge, one after another, their own nullity, and Stalin’s superior wisdom.

  His loyal henchmen were, of course, not to be outdone. “Brother Kirov” mentioned Stalin’s name twenty-two times in his speech, showing an enviable ingenuity in his choice of epithets: “the helmsman of our great socialist construction,” “the supreme strategist in the battle for the liberation of the toilers,” and so on. From Kirov came a proposal without precedent in the history of Party Congresses, that “all the theses and conclusions contained in Comrade Stalin’s report should be adopted as Party law and acted upon accordingly.” Barely a year after the horrifying famine, the Congress declared that the “foundations of a socialist society” had already been laid. The country found that it was already living in the long-awaited age of socialism, the heart’s desire of all revolutionaries.

  “The Congress of Victors,” Stalin decided to call it. Out of modesty, of course. It was really “the Congress of the Victor.”

  BEHIND THE SCENES

  And then it emerged that a bomb had been prepared for him. Yagoda’s department had exerted itself, and Stalin learned what had been going on in the lobbies. Kirov also came and told him. Nikita Khrushchev, who took part in the Seventeenth Congress, and was then a young protégé of Kaganovich and a loyal Stalinist, later told the story: “At that time the secretary of the North Caucasian Territorial Party Committee, Sheboldayev, occupied a prominent position in the Party. This Sheboldayev, an old Bolshevik, came to Comrade Kirov during the Congress and said: ‘The older comrades are talking about going back to Lenin’s Testament and acting on it, in other words transferring Stalin to some other post, as Lenin recommended, and putting in his place someone who would show more tolerance to those around him. People are saying that it would be a good idea to promote you to the post of General Secretary.’ … What Kirov’s answer was I don’t know, but it became known that Kirov had gone to Stalin and told him about his conversation with Sheboldayev. Stalin is supposed to have said, ‘Thank you, I won’t forget what I owe you.’ ”

  There is also a deposition made by V. Verkhovykh, a delegate to the Congress, in 1960. He wrote that “S. Kosior, a candidate member of the Politburo,… told me that some people … had talked to Kirov, trying to get him to agree to be General Secretary. Kirov refused.” Another delegate, Z. Nemtsova, told how Kirov gave the Leningrad delegation a dressing-down in their hotel for mentioning him as a possible General Secretary. This was the way people were talking in the lobbies while the Boss was being eulogized on the platform and wildly applauded from the hall. Another reminder that “however well you feed a wolf it hankers after the forest.” The old Party would never fully accept him as its leader, never fully reconcile itself to him. The final proof of this came when the Congress which had glorified him came to cast its votes.

  THE VOTE

  The concluding item of business was the election by secret ballot of the Party’s highest organ, the Central Committee. Only one candidate was nominated for each place to be filled. Every candidate obtaining more than fifty percent of the votes was considered elected. The Boss had deliberately arranged the mode of election so as to preclude choice.

  Voting papers were distributed to the delegates and the election got under way. “Stalin,” so Khrushchev recounted in his memoirs, “demonstratively walked up to the ballot box and dropped his papers in without looking.”

  This was an invitation to others to follow his example.

  But then something unexpected happened. According to a widely known story, Zatonsky, the chairman of the Electoral Commission, anxiously informed Kaganovich, who was in charge of Congress arrangements, that 270 votes had been cast against Stalin.

  In the note mentioned earlier, Verkhovykh wrote that “as a delegate to the Seventeenth Congress I was elected to the Tellers’ Commission. The result of the voting was that … the largest number of votes ‘against’ went to Stalin, Molotov, and Kaganovich.” O. Shatunovskaya, an old Party member, and also a teller at the Congress, wrote in a letter to the Central Committee in Khrushchev’s time that 292 votes were cast against Stalin.

  The biggest surprise is that the suppressed documentation of the tellers at the Seventeenth Congress survives in the Party Archive. During the Khrushchev Thaw the packets of voting papers were opened. It emerged that of 1,225 delegates who should have voted, only 1,059 appeared to have done so. Evidently, 166 “no” votes had been removed.

  In spite of the 166 votes against him—and even if the number was in fact 292—Stalin would still have been duly elected to the Central Committee. Nonetheless, such a shocking number of “no” votes would have been a heavy blow to his prestige in the Party. As a result of the prompt remedial measures taken by Kaganovich, the official announcement of the Tellers’ Commission showed that only three votes had been cast against Stalin, four against Kirov … and so on.

  We see then that dozens of the delegates who had applauded Stalin voted against him in a secret ballot. “Cowardly double-dealers,” he called them. There was not a single person in the ranks of the glorious Leninist guard brave enough to proclaim his beliefs out loud.

  Of course everyone was afraid. Of course it could mean certain death. But even in the days of Nero’s most terrible orgy of executions, some individuals spoke out openly against the emperor in the Roman Senate. They knew that it meant death, but they spoke out for all to hear.

  The vote, then, was not just evidence of double-
dealing. It showed that the system of terror Stalin had created was highly effective. And that he could now get to work without delay.

  What they had voted for that day was their own destruction.

  But for the present the warm spell continued. He gave them a little time to enjoy life under socialism, while he decided when to begin, and how many of them to remove.

  Or rather (as Tkachev once put it) how many must be kept.

  Of the 139 senior Party leaders present at the Congress, only 31 would die natural deaths.

  TESTING THE INTELLIGENTSIA

  In that same year, 1934, the poet Osip Mandelstam was arrested. This sent a shock wave through a Moscow enjoying the warm spell.

  I am looking through the records of his case, which has been a legend for half a century: “Case No. 4108—Accused—Citizen Mandelstam, O., commenced 17.5.34.” Then follows the report on the house search. That day in May, “letters, notes with telephone numbers and addresses, and manuscripts on separate sheets, forty-eight in number,” were removed from his apartment. The unhappy poet was taken to the Lubyanka. Here is an excerpt from the record of his first interrogation on May 18: “Do you admit that you are guilty of writing works of a counterrevolutionary character?” “Yes, I am the author of the following verses: