We follow you to wondrous times,
We tread the path of victory …
The God-Man … Konstantin Simonov, one of the most famous writers of the Stalin era, was made a member of the Stalin Prize Committee. In his memoirs, he described Stalin’s behavior at a meeting of the committee called to consider works of literature recommended for one of the prizes bearing his name. He walked about inaudibly behind the backs of members of the Committee. This was his usual practice, so that they could not see the God’s face. This raised the tension as they struggled to divine and to do his will.… He paced the room, sucking his pipe. The Secretary of the Commission called out “the writer S. Zlobin, candidate for a Stalin Prize for his novel Stepan Razin. Malenkov unexpectedly intervened: ‘Comrade Stalin, Zlobin was in a German POW camp and behaved badly.’ There was an astonished silence. Everybody knew that candidates were carefully screened beforehand. Was this meant to test the members of the commission? Stalin’s quiet voice broke the silence. ‘Should we forgive him, or shouldn’t we?’ They were all silent. They were afraid. He slowly circled the table, smoking his pipe, and asked again: ‘Should we forgive him, or shouldn’t we?’ Again, a deathly silence was the only answer: the accusation made against Zlobin was a terrible one! He should be losing his head, not winning a Stalin Prize! Now he was making his third round of the table. Again he asked: ‘Should we or shouldn’t we forgive him?’ But this time he answered his own question: ‘He is forgiven.’ ” So instead of being sent to a prison camp Zlobin became a Stalin laureate—raised in the twinkling of an eye to the summit of wealth and fame! Yes, he and he alone was the arbiter of destinies. It was given to him, the God-Man, to pardon any crime. This was his way of teaching them.
His comrades-in-arms, by now half-mad with fear, racked their brains trying to decide how to celebrate his jubilee. In 1945, for the victory (Stalin’s victory) over Germany, they had already bestowed on him the title of “Generalissimus.” Marshal Konyev remembered how Stalin had grumbled at the time, “What need has Comrade Stalin of that? Some title you’ve thought up! Chiang Kai-shek is a generalissimo. Franco is a generalissimo—fine company I find myself in!” But he became “Generalissimus” nonetheless, accepting promotion to what had been the highest military rank in tsarist times. He was portrayed more and more frequently in marshal’s uniform, with red stripes on his trousers. These were one of the distinguishing features of the uniform worn by high officers in the tsarist armies.
He had not only renamed the People’s Commissariats “ministries”—another throwback to Tsarist times—but reintroduced uniforms for bureaucrats. His henchmen, of course, understood the Boss’s aspirations. Obviously they had to think up something very special for his jubilee, a title, equivalent to that of “tsar.” But it had to be a revolutionary title. The anniversary was getting nearer and nearer, the tension was growing, and still they couldn’t think of anything. I found traces of their agonized lucubrations in the archives. “Secret. December 16, 1949. Project for the introduction of an ‘Order of Stalin and a Jubilee Medal’… ‘Medal for Laureates of the International Stalin Prize.’ ” They just couldn’t think of anything new. He realized yet again how indolent his henchmen had become. He, of course, would not hear of an Order of Stalin, “which would rank below the Order of Lenin,” in the words of the planned citation.
They misunderstood him. He was not afflicted with senile vainglory. The realization of the Great Dream was imminent, when he would lead his peoples in their assault on the enemy’s stronghold. The image of the god—the God Stalin—would lead them into that last, decisive, and truly bloody battle. That was the whole purpose of the Stalin cult. That was why his newspapers and his radio had to exalt his name day and night.… The earth was filled with the thunder of his name. As a contemporary wrote in her diary: “Stalin here, Stalin there, Stalin, Stalin everywhere. You can’t go out to the kitchen, or sit on the toilet, or eat without Stalin following you.… He creeps into your guts and your very soul, creeps into your brain, stops up all holes, treads on a person’s heels, rings you up in your innermost self, gets into bed with you under the blanket, haunts your memories and your dreams.”
THE SINS OF THE FATHER
At the end of his life he said, laughingly, about his henchmen, “They’re all great men! All geniuses! But there’s nobody to have tea with.” At the summit of his power he was utterly alone. His henchmen—soon to die—exasperated him. His daughter had become a stranger. In 1944 she decided to marry a Moscow University student named Grigori Morozov. She had known him for a long time—they had attended the same exclusive school. He was the handsome son of a well-off intellectual family; his father was deputy director of a scientific research institute. But Grigori was Jewish. Svetlana went to the nearer dacha to tell her father the news. “It was May,” she wrote in her memoirs, “and everything was in flower.” “So you want to get married?” her father said. Then he was silent for a long time, looking at the trees. “Yes, it’s spring,” he said suddenly, and then added, “Do what the hell you like.” But he would not allow her to bring Grigori home. She gave birth to a boy, strangely like Stalin, and gave the child his name. But shortly afterward she got a divorce. Stalin had not pushed her into it; it was her own idea. She then married the son of the deceased Zhdanov. He was pleased with this marriage, but father and daughter still saw little of each other. One day he mentioned her mother to her—for the first time in her life. It happened during the November celebrations—on November 9. This, the anniversary of the October Revolution, was the country’s most important official holiday, and also the day on which Nadezhda had died.
“It poisoned the holiday for him,” Svetlana wrote in her memoirs, “and he preferred to spend it in the South.” On this occasion she had gone there to join him. They were alone together, when he suddenly said angrily: “It was such a wretched little pistol.” (He showed her how small it was.) “It was Pavel who brought it! What a present to give her.” Then he was silent. They never spoke of it again. His daughter left, and once again there was a long interval before their next meeting. Although he often thought of her and remembered when she was “mistress of the house.” For many years now Valechka Istomina, a maidservant at the nearer dacha, had been the woman at his side. She was never “mistress of the house.” Just a humble servant. But devoted to him—and that was what mattered.
He was getting old. And, like any aging Georgian, he had become fond of his son. That was why Vasily had risen so rapidly since the war.
At twenty-seven he commanded the air arm of the Moscow Military District. The Boss’s son organized those famous aerial displays. The Boss and the whole Politburo drove out to the airfield at Tushino to see them. Together they watched daring aerobatics, and mock air battles, while the whole country sat listening to radio commentaries on the display. The announcer’s voice had a steely ring when he spoke of the plane piloted by Vasily. According to Marshal Savitsky, “It is a myth that Vasya led the aerial displays over Red Square or at Tushino. He sat in the right-hand seat, the bomber’s—in other words he just sat there while the flight commander was at the controls and actually flying the plane.”
People were afraid for Vasya, who was drinking more than ever. After divorcing his wife, he left the House on the Embankment and went to live in a detached house on Gogol Boulevard, taking both children with him. Their mother had no right of access, but visited them secretly. It was Anna Karenina: the children’s nurse could not bear a mother’s grief, and surreptitiously arranged for her to see her children. Vasya, meanwhile, married the famous swimmer Kapitolina Vasilieva. He showed his love as Caesar’s son should, and built for her a whole sports complex, which still adorns the Leningrad Prospect. The first 50-meter covered swimming pool in the country is a monument to their love. But this marriage was also short-lived.
Vasily was arrested after Stalin’s death and charged with “systematic misappropriation of state property.” The records of the criminal proceedings against him are i
n the President’s Archive. The files give a detailed account of his way of life. What follows is from the testimony of his adjutant, Polyansky: “Vasily drank heavily almost every day, did not turn up at work for weeks on end, and could not leave the women alone.… He had so many affairs that if I were asked how many I wouldn’t know what to say.… Using air force funds he established a 55-hectare [135-acre] reserve for hunting in the Pereyaslav-Zalessky area, where three villas were built, linked by a narrow-gauge railroad.… Fifty spotted deer, a number of willow grouse, and other game were delivered to the estate.” And from the testimony of B. Voitekhov, a writer: “At the end of 1949 I arrived at the apartment of my second wife, the actress Maria Pastukhova, and found her in a state of extreme distress. She said that Vasily had just visited her, and tried to force her to become his mistress. I went to his apartment and found him drinking with other fliers.… Vasily knelt down, called himself a heel and a scum, and said that he was sleeping with my wife. In 1951 we made peace with each other. I had money troubles and he gave me a job on his staff, as a consultant. I did no work but received the same wage as an air force sportsman.”
And his chauffeur A. Brot recalled: “He had a big garage at headquarters. As far as he was concerned, traffic regulations did not exist. He would be sitting beside me in the passenger seat after a few drinks and put his foot down on the accelerator. He always made me drive fast, often on the same side as the oncoming traffic.”
In spite of all this, the drunken Vasya’s dream was to be like his father. He longed to make everyone fear him. Major A. Kapelkin testified that “one night, just before the November holiday, he summoned me to his apartment and said: ‘We have to interrogate a terrorist.’ He said that Colonel Golovanov, the head of the counterespionage service, had ‘arrested a group of terrorists’ who allegedly intended to carry out a terrorist act against J. V. Stalin. Vasily announced that he himself would be questioning one of them—Major Kashin, formerly of the Personnel Department. He ordered one of his subordinates to take off his shoes and kneel on a chair. He then started beating the soles of the man’s feet with a thin rod, trying out the instrument of torture.… When Kashin was brought in, Vasily felled him with a blow. After this prelude Kashin was interrogated and denied the charges against him. He was made to kneel on the chair, but the rod broke after the first stroke on the soles of his feet. We tried to beat a confession out of him. Whenever he fell down we kicked him. Then we all started drinking.”
Brot, his driver, recalled that “Vasily soon got married for the third time, to a daughter of the war hero Marshal Timoshenko. She was very strict, and could be cruel. She did not like Vasily’s children. The cook and I used to give them extra food on the sly. His adjutant told me one day that a trunkload of presents from the High Command was on its way from conquered Germany. It arrived, and the adjutant collected a few things for Vasily, mainly desk sets. He gave orders for the rest to be sent to Vasily’s wife, Ekaterina, out at the dacha. It included golden ornaments with diamonds and emeralds, dozens of carpets, a lot of lady’s lingerie, a huge number of men’s suits, overcoats, fur coats, fur wraps, astrakhan.… Her house was bursting with gold, German carpets, and cut glass ever since the war anyway. She asked me to sell it all in commission shops. I was carting stuff there for a whole month, and handing the money over to Ekaterina.”
His father had hoped that the Timoshenkos, sensible, thrifty people, might perhaps bring Vasily to his senses. They didn’t. One scandalous situation followed another. Trying to deal with them distracted the Boss from the Great Dream.
THE PRINCE AND THE SPORTSMEN
Vasily’s great passion was sport, and the Air Force Sports Society. Above all, he loved soccer and hockey. In a very few years he had created the famous WS (air force) hockey team. Living accommodations in the USSR were not bought privately, but were allocated by the state. The star players in Caesar’s son’s team received the richest of rewards—apartments of their own—besides special rations and other benefits. In a very short time all the great stars were playing for the WS team. And the elite of Soviet hockey perished to a man after one of Vasily’s escapades.
The team was traveling by air to play at Chelyabinsk. A blizzard made it impossible for the plane to land at the Chelyabinsk airfield, and it had to touch down at Kazan. The players got restless and telephoned Moscow. Vasya Stalin, exercising his authority as commander of the Moscow Military District’s air arm, ordered the pilot to continue the flight. The plane crashed while attempting to land in the blizzard, and all eleven star players were killed. The plane itself was one which was supposed to take only Politburo members as passengers.
His father was informed immediately. He gave orders that the disaster should be given no publicity. Disasters did not happen in his country! The public knew only that the country’s finest hockey players had disappeared. No one dared ask where or why.
What Vasily, and the country at large, loved best was football. His bounty had also created an all-star football team. In the early fifties, only Dynamo, Beria’s team, could rival the WS squad. But although Vasya had recruited brilliant players, the WS team was a disappointment at first. It lacked an effective trainer—until Vasya remembered that Spartak’s famous trainer, Nikolai Starostin, was still serving his sentence in a camp somewhere in the Far East.
Starostin himself has described what followed. One night in 1948 he was awakened and taken by car to the camp commandant’s office. Over the secret government telephone line he heard a voice saying, “Hello, Nikolai. This is Vasily Stalin.” The personal plane of the commander of the WS landed on the nearest military airfield shortly afterward. Starostin was flown to Moscow and taken to the detached house on Gogol Boulevard. A decanter holding vodka stood on a table in the middle of an enormous room. Vasya drank to their meeting. A little later Starostin was at home, in the eight square yards which was all they had left of their own enormous apartment, with his wife and daughter beside him weeping for joy. But before he could begin training the WS team, Beria, the Dynamo fan, struck back. Two uniformed men turned up and told Starostin, “You know very well that you have come here illegally, and you must go back within twenty-four hours.”
Vasya was furious. How dare they! He quickly made up his mind. “You’ll live with me in my house. Nobody will touch you there.” After that the Boss’s prisoner and the Boss’s son were inseparable. They went together to headquarters, to training sessions, to Vasily’s dacha. They even slept in the same extrawide bed.
Vasily went to bed with a revolver under his pillow. He forbade Starostin to leave the house alone. But Starostin missed his family, and one day, when Vasily had drunk himself to sleep, he climbed through a window into the garden and went home. Next morning he was awakened by a ring at the door. Two colonels came in. Starostin was put on a train out of Moscow. But at the very first stop the head of Vasily’s counterespionage department boarded the coach and told Starostin, “I’ve caught up with you by plane. The Boss [Vasya loved to be called that] has ordered me to get you to Moscow by whatever means are necessary.” Once Starostin was safely delivered, Vasily grabbed the telephone, rang the Ministry of the Interior, asked for one of Beria’s deputies, and said “Two hours ago you told me that you didn’t know where Starostin was.… He is now sitting here with me. Your people had abducted him. Just remember that in our family we never forgive an insult.” In the end his father had to intervene. Order had to prevail. Starostin was sent back.
All this time, Vasily was drinking heavily. Disaster struck in 1952. S. Rudenko, commander of long-distance aircraft, and P. Zhigarev, commander-in-chief of air forces relieved the drunkard of responsibility for the Tushino air display. The display was a brilliant success, and Stalin broadcast his thanks to all those who had taken part. Afterward Vasily, scarcely able to stand on his feet, turned up at a reception attended by his father, his fathers henchmen, and high-ranking officers. “What do you mean by this?” his father asked. “I’m on holiday.” “Do you often spend you
r holidays like this?” There was silence. Then Zhigarev said, “Yes, he does.” Vasily cursed Zhigarev.
The silence was terrifying. Then Stalin said curtly, “Get out of here.” Vasily was relieved of all his posts, and enrolled as a student in the Aviation Faculty of the Military Academy.
But the Boss remembered how his henchmen and the service chiefs—braggarts whose egos had become inflated during the war—had gloated over his son’s humiliation, and hadn’t even tried to hide it. He knew, of course, why Vasya drank and misbehaved. His poor weak son was mortally afraid of what would happen to him when his aged father was no more. He tried to drown his fear with drink, to deaden it with womanizing. They—Stalin’s old henchmen—would rid themselves of Vasily immediately. His son knew far too much about them.
HE BECOMES A MYSTERY EVEN TO HIS HENCHMEN
It was 1950. His life followed the routine which he had long ago established: the same nocturnal banquets, sometimes prolonged till dawn. After a long day’s work in the Kremlin his henchmen still had to drive out with him to the dacha for the torment of a sleepless night’s drinking. But to be invited was happiness enough: it meant that he was not yet ready to destroy them. Forty years later his ancient former bodyguards would tell me about the secret life of this lonely man in the hermetically sealed nearer dacha.
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