Stalin

by Edvard Radzinsky

  What about Khrustalev? I asked Lozgachev. He replied, “Khrustalev fell ill and died soon after. Orlov and Starostin were posted to Vladimir, and I remained at the ‘object’—the ‘object’ was vacant, and I was in charge of it. It was handed over to the Ministry of Health.… That was the end of the nearer dacha.… Valechka Istomina … was thirty-eight at the time, she used to look after him, see to his shirts and socks and linen, I don’t know what else there may have been between them. She was a clever one, talkative, a chatterbox, I’ve seen her a few times since, she was sent away somewhere at first. Now she’s in Moscow, married, with grandchildren.”

  Stalin lay in state in the Hall of Columns, and thousands of mourners took to the streets. Trainloads of people arrived from every town, to say goodbye to the God. His fellow citizens, who idolized him, and of whom he had destroyed more than all Russia’s wars put together, trampled each other in the struggle to catch one last glimpse of him, to say farewell.

  I remember that sunny day, I remember the girl standing in front of me. The crowd was crushing us. The militia were hemming us in, and we were suffocating. I remembered that girl’s fear-crazed eyes. Suddenly something gave, and people began falling down. I found myself carried away, pinned between two sets of shoulders, stumbling over bodies, right out of the crowd, where I was flung onto the roadway. The skirt of my overcoat was torn, but I was alive. Thousands were carried off to mortuaries that day. He had refused to depart without a blood sacrifice.… The crushed mourners joined the millions he had destroyed in his lifetime.

  On the day of Stalin’s death, March 5, 1953, another death passed quite unnoticed—that of Sergei Prokofiev. His widow tried to get flowers, flowers of any sort, for his coffin. But everything was closed, nothing was being sold. Her neighbor took cuttings from all the indoor plants so that there would be something at least to lay on the great composer’s coffin. Prokofiev’s favorite pianist, Svyatoslav Richter, was flying from Tiflis at the time, to play beside the Leader’s coffin in the Hall of Columns. It was a special plane, and it was crammed full of flowers. Richter was almost suffocated by their scent.

  The Burial Commission was in permanent session, doing its utmost to immortalize the Leader: “The Commission deems it expedient to carry out the long-term embalmment of Comrade Stalin’s body in the special laboratory of the Lenin Mausoleum. Comrade Stalin’s body must be laid in the coffin in military uniform, with the medals of Hero of the Soviet Union and Hero of Socialist Labor, and also ribbons of his other decorations and medals, attached to his tunic.… A decree on the construction of a Pantheon should be drafted.” Instructions to the embalmers specified that his shoulder boards, the buttons on his uniform, and his “hero’s stars” must be of gold.

  The sarcophagus containing the mummy of the second Bolshevik God stood outside the Mausoleum. On the Mausoleum stood the loyal comrades-in-arms who had killed him: Malenkov in a cap with ear flaps, Khrushchev in a squashed fur hat, Beria in a felt hat with the broad brim pulled down over his pince-nez, looking like a Hollywood mafioso. They joined in glorifying the murdered God.

  After the funeral the Boss’s comrades arranged for his son’s apartment to be permanently bugged. The records of his conversations are in the President’s Archive. We have Vasily talking to his chauffeur, Fevralev, about the funeral: “All those people crushed—it’s terrible! I had a row with Khrushchev about it.… Something terrible happened in the House of the Unions. An old woman with a walking stick came in, Malenkov, Beria, and Molotov were standing in the guard of honor … and suddenly the old woman says, ‘You killed him, you swine, now you can be happy! May you be damned!’ ” Three weeks after his father’s death Lieutenant General of Aviation Vasily Stalin was discharged from the Soviet regular army without the right to wear military uniform. A month after that he was arrested. The once too-powerful general finally came out of prison only in the spring of 1961. He was banished to Kazan, where he died on March 19, 1962. Perhaps, following the tradition established by his father, someone helped him to die?

  Beria, who had jailed Vasily, shortly followed him inside. A description of his execution has survived. “They tied his hands behind his back and attached him to a hook driven into a wooden board. Beria said, ‘Permit me to say …’ but the Procurator General said, ‘Gag his mouth with a towel.’ One protruding eye glared at them wildly over the blindfold. The officer pulled the trigger and the bullet struck him in the middle of the forehead.” Malenkov, Molotov, Kaganovich—they all fell in turn. And last of all, Khrushchev.

  While his henchmen were destroying each other, people in dirty padded jackets drifted over the expanses of Stalin’s empire. The great deliverance from the camps was under way. Alexei Kapler, whom his daughter once loved, was one of those freed. Many years later he told me about it. “I went into a little park and stared stupidly at the children playing. One little boy ran past me, laughing—I saw his skinny, defenseless childish legs. And something happened to me. I burst into tears. I sobbed and sobbed shamelessly—enjoying it, like I used to in my childhood. I wept and wept … forgiving them … forgiving everybody.”

  Stalin himself, even after Khrushchev’s denunciation, still lay in the Mausoleum. I remember when I first saw him: beside Lenin’s doll-like head, his face was that of a living person. Stubble had grown on his cheeks.

  Eight years went by before they could bring themselves to remove him. F. Konyev, Commander of the Kremlin Regiment, remembered the occasion.

  October 31, 1961. Militia squads cleared Red Square and closed off all the entrances. When it was completely dark they finally got around to digging a grave by the Kremlin wall.… They transferred Stalin’s body from the sarcophagus to a coffin lined with red cloth. He looked as if he was alive; the Mausoleum staff wept as they switched off the installation. They replaced the golden buttons with brass ones, and also removed his golden shoulder boards. Then they covered the body with a dark veil, leaving only his lifelike face uncovered. At 22:00 the Reburial Commission arrived. No relatives were present.… After a minute’s silence we lowered him into the grave. We had orders to cover him with two concrete slabs [as if they feared that he might return from the grave]. But we just shoveled earth onto him.

  END OF AN AGE

  Perestroika arrived, Gorbachev came to power, people began reviewing what they had lived through. I received a letter:

  My name is Yuri Nikolaevich Pepelyaev. I have long been curious about my family. Can you possibly give me detailed information about my relatives, and in particular:

  —Pepelyaev, N. M. Major General in the tsar’s army, killed 1916, in the First World War.

  —Pepelyaev, V. N. President of the Council of Ministers in Kolchak’s government, shot in 1920 at Irkutsk.

  —Pepelyaev, A. N. Lieutenant General, commanded Kolchak’s First Siberian Army, then fought in the Far East, was forced to surrender. Sentenced to death and shot in 1938.

  —Pepelyaev, L. N. White officer, killed during the Civil War.

  —Pepelyaev, M. N. Staff Captain in the tsar’s army, convicted in 1933, died in prison camp.

  —Pepelyaev, A. N. Surgeon in Kolchak’s army, tried and convicted 1942, died in Siblag [a prison camp] in 1946.

  —Pepelyaev, A. I. Member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, shot by the Cheka at Perm in 1918.

  —Pepelyaev, M. E. My grandfather, resident at Blisk, tried and convicted in the thirties.

  —Pepelyaev, M. I. Resident at Blisk, killed in the great Patriotic War [World War II].

  Pepelyaev’s letter is a concise history of Russia in the twentieth century.

  Two of the Boss’s faithful comrades-in-arms, Molotov and Kaganovich, lived on. They walked about the streets like ghosts. In his last years Molotov began to forget things. At times he imagined that he was Chairman of the Council of Ministers again, called for his suit and a tie, and sat waiting for Gorbachev’s ministers to report to him. Not until 1986 did this man who had been born under Alexander III, lived under Nicholas
II, worked with Lenin and Stalin, finally seek rest in the traditional Bolshevik red-lined coffin.

  Kaganovich dragged on into the nineties. A relative of his told me: “He died in July 1991. The television was broadcasting the latest news of perestroika, showing Gorbachev and Yeltsin. The maid heard him say, ‘It’s a catastrophe.’ When she looked around he was sitting in front of the television set dead.”

  Three weeks later, in August 1991, the crowd smashed statues of the God Lenin and broke windows in the sacred building of his Party’s Central Committee. The USSR, the greatest of empires, built by the Boss to endure through the ages, was crumbling with bewildering rapidity.

  The Tower of Babel and the Great Dream were no more.

  Alas! alas! thou great city, thou mighty city, Babylon! In one hour has thy judgment come!

  —Revelation 18:10

  AFTERWORD

  I thought that my book was complete, but something needs to be added.

  In 1995 the new Russia celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of its victory over Germany. There was a victory parade, as in the past. But this time the man standing on the Lenin Mausoleum, where once the Boss had stood, was President Yeltsin. And a little green curtain hid the inscription “Lenin” on the Mausoleum. Western leaders, among them President Clinton and Prime Minister Major, stood in a group at the base of the Mausoleum. Standing there beside the Sacred Body they watched the veterans march past—the remnants of the great army which had defeated fascism, and which had, in its creator’s mind, been destined to conquer the whole world.

  Another procession coincided with the victory parade: a demonstration fifty thousand strong. Loudly singing songs from the Stalin era, they proceeded from the Belorussian Station, through the main streets of Moscow, to Mayakovsky Square.

  For the first time since his death, dozens of portraits of Stalin floated by, held aloft over the heads of the demonstrators.

  Yelling raucous slogans, Communists, monarchists, and Russian fascists marched side by side, at one in their devotion to the Boss.

  And rightly so. Was he not a greater national-socialist than Hitler? Had he not created the greatest of monarchist cults and enlarged the empire of the Romanovs? And had he not served the Great Dream—a world in which Bolshevism reigned supreme?

  Stalin had bided his time underground for over forty years. While those of his victims who had survived the horrors of his reign of terror died off one by one, and while their children grew old.… But now that the Great Amnesia had come upon the land, the Boss had risen from the grave.

  People streamed past, with pictures of the Boss bobbing overhead, some of them bearing such eloquent inscriptions as “Jews Beware! Stalin Will Soon Return!”

  The Russian religious philosopher Georgi Fedotov, writing at the end of the twenties, foretold with dread a time when “the obsessive malice at present concentrated on the construction of a godless Leninist International is directed instead to the creation of a nationalist and Orthodox Russia.… And the hand which today kills kulaks and the bourgeois will kill Jews and non-Russians. And man’s black soul will remain as it was, or rather it will become blacker.”

  Those walking in the procession included priests in cassocks—also under portraits of Stalin.

  Was Holy Russia preparing to rise again under a portrait of the Devil?

  Fedotov’s article, however, has an epigraph: “And Satan exults and mocks you, because you were called Christs.”

  Yes, they are ready now to restore his empire, the bloody Babylon of yesterday. Surely it cannot happen again! The suffering and the bloodshed! Surely this unhappy land will have to learn yet again the truth of those words: “Woe, woe unto thee, thou mighty city Babylon, thou strong city!”

  “I am the First and the Last, and besides me there is no other God.”

  SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

  ARCHIVAL SOURCES

  ARCHIVE OF THE PRESIDENT OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION

  Documents on security of party documents. F3 O22 D76,78,9.

  STALIN’S PERSONAL ARCHIVE

  Letters to his mother, E. G. Dzhugashvili. F45 O1 D1549.

  Correspondence with his wife Nadezhda. F45 O1 D1550.

  Letters from Nadezhda Alliluyeva to Maria Svanidze. F44 O1 D1.

  Letters from Nadezhda Alliluyeva to E. G. Dzhugashvili. F45 O1 D1549.

  Letters from Svetlana to her father. F45 O1 D1551–1553.

  Prosecution of Vasily Stalin. F45 O1 D1557–1558.

  Record of interrogation of Yakov Dzhugashvili at HQ of Commander Aviation, Fourth Army [Translation from the German made for Stalin]. F45 O1 D1554.

  Report from NKVD to I. V. Stalin on details of death of Yakov Dzhugashvili. F45 O1 D1555.

  Letter from I. V. Sapegin to Vasily Stalin about Yakov Dzhugashvili. F45 O1 D1553.

  V. Butochnikov’s recollections of Yakov Dzhugashvili. F45 O1 D1554.

  Report to Stalin from head of Kremlin Clinic on causes of death of Pavel Alliluyev. F45. O1 D1497.

  Medical History (“History of Illness”) of N. S. Alliluyeva. F45 O1 D155.

  Medical History (History of Illness) of I. V. Stalin. F45 O1 D1482.

  Diary of Maria Svanidze. F45 O1 D1.

  Letter from Stalin to Politburo, March 21, 1923, on Krupskaya’s request for potassium cyanide. F3 O22 D307.

  Letter from Tukhachevsky to Stalin and his note on the reconstruction of the Red Army. F45 O1 D447–451.

  I. V. Stalin’s speech at session of the Military Council of the People’s Commissariat of Defense, June 2, 1937. F45 O1 D1120.

  Letter from Bukharin to Stalin on Mandelstam. F45 L1 D709.

  Letters from Bukharin to Stalin immediately before and after his arrest. F3 O24 DD 236, 262, 270, 291, 301, 427.

  Correspondence of I. V. Stalin with V. M. Molotov. F45 01 DD768, 769, 771. (Also Kommunist, No. 11/1990; Izvestia, Ts.K.KPSS Nos. 7, 9/1991. F45 O1 DD678, 769, 771.)

  Letter from the teacher Martyshin to I. V. Stalin. F45 O1 D1552.

  “Stalin’s Visitors’ Book” Nov.–Dec. 1934. F45 O1 D411. October 1939. F45 O1 D412.

  Plenum of Central Committee of All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks). February 23–March 5, 1937. Stenographic report.

  Plenum of Central Committee of Communist Party of Soviet Union. June 22–27, 1957. Stenographic report.

  RUSSIAN CENTER FOR THE PRESERVATION AND STUDY OF DOCUMENTS RELATING TO MODERN HISTORY (FORMERLY CENTRAL PARTY ARCHIVE)

  Documents on the birth of I. V. Dzhugashvili. F558 O1 D1–2.

  P. Kapanadze’s reminiscences: Stalin’s childhood and adolescence. F558 O4 D669.

  Materials on childhood and adolescence of Stalin. F7 O10 D213.

  Recollections of various persons of meetings with Stalin during his time at the church school and the seminary. F558 O4 D665.

  S. Y. Alliluyeva’s manuscript: “In the Fire of Revolution.” F558 O4 D668.

  Recollections of S. Y. And A. S. Alliluyev on meetings with Stalin before the February Revolution. F558 O4 D659.

  Memoirs of Fyodor Alliluyev, 1938–1946. F558 O4 D663.

  Notification of death of Ekaterina Svanidze. F558 O4 D97.

  Recollections of various persons of Stalin’s period in exile at Turukhansk. F558 O4 D662.

  Proceedings of the Executive Committee of Comintern: On Work Underground. F495 O3 D23–26.

  Documents of the Commission of the Executive Committee of Comintern on Work Underground. F495 O27 D2.

  N. Krupskaya: “The Last Year and a Half of Lenin’s Life.” F16 O3 D13.

  Letter from Krupskaya to I. Armand on Lenin’s illness. F12 O2 D254.

  “Medical History of Comrade Krupskaya, N. K.” F12 O1 D47.

  Note of Maria Ulyanova on Lenin’s attitude to Stalin. F14 O1 D398.

  History of Stalin’s illness in 1921. F558 O4 D675.

  Memorandum on Comrade Dr. Julius Hammer and his son Armand Hammer. F2 O1 D24800.

  Uglanov’s testimony. F589 O3 D9354.

  Letter from Stalin t
o L. Kamenev. F558 O2 D17.

  Stalin’s last letter to Lenin, March 7, 1923. F2 O1 D26004.

  Fotieva’s letter to Kamenev on Lenin’s “Letter to the Congress.” F5 O1 D276.

  Letter from G. Dimitrov, Secretary General of Executive Committee of Comintern, and D. Manuilsky, Secretary of Executive Committee of Comintern,

  to Central Committee of All-Union Communist Party, October 10, 1937. F17 O120 D259.

  Materials on Ordzhonikidze. F85 O1 D143.

  BOOKS FROM I. V. STALIN’S PRIVATE LIBRARY WITH HIS ANNOTATIONS

  Proof copy of Short Biography of Stalin, read and corrected by Stalin, 8.1.1947. F71 O10 D261.

  Trotsky, L. D.: Terrorism and Communism. F558 O3 D364.

  Kautsky, K.: Terrorism and Communism. F558 O3 D90.