The struggles among the communist party factions were also a contest for individual supremacy. Trotski, Zinoviev, Bukharin and Stalin each felt worthy to succeed Lenin, and even Kamenev had ambition. Stalin was tired of seeing his rivals strutting on the public stage. He accepted that they were good orators and that he would never match them in this. Yet he was proud – in his brittle, over-sensitive way – that his contribution to Bolshevism was mainly practical in nature: he thought praktiki like himself were the party’s backbone. The praktiki looked up to Lenin as the eagle who scattered his opponents like mere chickens. Stalin seemed unimpressive to those who did not know him and indeed to many who did; but he was already determined to fly into history as the party’s second eagle.1 He did not just scatter his rivals for the succession: whenever possible, he swooped down and tore them to bits. Chatting to Kamenev and Dzierżyński in 1923, he had explained his general attitude: ‘The greatest delight is to pick out one’s enemy, prepare all the details of the blow, to slake one’s thirst for a cruel revenge and then go home to bed!’2
Such was the man who had taken Nadya Allilueva as his wife after the October Revolution. There had been no wedding ceremony, but their daughter Svetlana was told that her parents lived as spouses from some unspecified time before the Soviet government’s transfer from Petrograd to Moscow in 1918. (Apparently the official registration did not take place until 24 March 1919.)3 Nadya was less than half his age at the time and he was her revolutionary hero; and she had yet to learn that the harsh features of his character were not reserved exclusively for the enemies of communism.
At first things went well. Alexandra Kollontai, who got to know Nadya in the winter of 1919–20, was impressed by her ‘charming beauty of soul’ as well as by Stalin’s demeanour: ‘He takes a great deal of notice of her.’4 But trouble was already in the air. Joseph wanted a wife who took household management as her priority; this was one of Nadya’s accomplishments which had caught his eye in 1917.5 Nadya, however, wanted a professional career. As the daughter of a Bolshevik veteran, she had carried out important technical tasks on the party’s behalf in the Civil War. Although she had no professional qualifications, she had a grammar school education and proved a competent clerk at a time when politically reliable secretaries were few.6 She soon learned how to decode telegrams transmitting confidential information among Soviet leaders, including her husband.7 Lenin employed her on his personal staff.8 Joseph was more often absent on campaign than at home until autumn 1920, leaving Nadya to devote herself to her Sovnarkom duties. She became so close to the Lenins that if Nadezhda Krupskaya was going away on a trip, she would ask her to feed their cat. (Lenin could not be depended upon.)9 Nadya joined the party, assuming that her involvement in Bolshevik administration at the highest level would continue.
Her hope was dashed when Joseph returned from the Soviet–Polish War and family chores increased. Joseph wanted a settled domesticity at the end of his working day, whenever that might be. Matters came to a head late in the winter of 1920–1. Nadya, pregnant since June 1920, had gone on working while carrying the child. Joseph himself had fallen badly ill. In the Civil War he had frequently complained of his aches and pains as well as his ‘exhaustion’.10 No one had taken him seriously because he had usually done this when trying to resign in high dudgeon. Brother-in-law Fëdor Alliluev, seeing him before the Tenth Party Congress, remarked how tired he looked. Stalin agreed: ‘Yes, I’m tired. I need to go off to the woods, to the woods! To relax and have a proper rest and sleep as one ought!’11 He took a few days off. It was only when he retired to his bed after the Congress that medical attention became an obvious necessity. Professor Vladimir Rozanov, one of the Kremlin doctors, diagnosed chronic appendicitis. Rozanov said the problem might have existed for a dozen years; he could barely believe Stalin had been able to stand upright. Instant surgery was vital.
Operations for appendicitis in that period were often fatal. Rozanov worried that the procedure could infect Stalin’s peritoneum; he also thought him dangerously thin.12 Initially a local anaesthetic was administered because of his weakened condition. Yet the pain became unbearable and the operation was not completed until after a dose of chloroform. Allowed home afterwards, Stalin lay on a divan reading books and convalesced over the next two months. As he got better, he went out in search of company. By June he had been passed fit. Coming upon Mikhail Kalinin in discussion with other Bolsheviks about the NEP, he announced his return to work: ‘It’s oppressive to lie around by yourself and so I’ve got up: it’s boring without one’s comrades.’13 This sentiment might easily have been included in any collection of memoirs about Stalin; but the rest of Fëdor Alliluev’s story was too embarrassing for Stalin to allow publication. He would not permit people to discover that he had ever been anything but tough in mind and body.
Joseph’s illness and recuperation coincided with the arrival of their first child. Vasili Stalin was born in Moscow on 21 March 1921. Delight at his safe delivery was tempered for Nadya by the fact that Joseph increased pressure on her to dedicate herself to domesticity. No one on her side of the family helped her out: all of them, including her mother Olga, were immersed in political activity. Olga was anyway hardly a model for child rearers. When Nadya and the other Alliluev children had been young, they had often had to fend for themselves while their parents went about their professional lives and revolutionary activity.
Nadya could not turn for help to the other side of the family: Joseph’s mother Keke adamantly refused to move to Moscow. In June 1921, after recovering from the appendicitis operation, Stalin had headed south on party business to Georgia and visited Keke. The son greeted his mother without the warmth that might have been expected after their long separation.14 She knew her own mind and did not flinch from enquiring: ‘Son, there’s none of the tsar’s blood on your hands, is there?’ Shuffling on his feet, he made the sign of the cross and swore that he had had no part in it. His friend Sergo Ordzhonikidze expressed surprise at this religious recidivism; but Stalin exclaimed: ‘She’s a believer! I wish to God that our people believed in Marxism as they do in God!’15 They had been apart from each other for many years; and even though he had wriggled out of answering her straightforwardly, her question to him showed she knew a gulf of belief would continue to keep them apart. As a Christian Keke had reason to tell her son that the Red Kremlin was no place for her. For her safety and comfort, Stalin moved her into one of the servants’ apartment in the old Viceroy’s palace in Tbilisi. Budu Mdivani commented that the local authorities increased the guard on her: ‘This is so that she doesn’t give birth to another Stalin!’16
But Joseph did not come back unaccompanied. In Georgia he also sought out his son Yakov by his first wife Ketevan. Yakov had been looked after by Ketevan’s brother Alexander Svanidze and his wife Maria. Joseph hardly knew the thirteen-year-old Yakov but wished to take him at last into his care – or at least into Nadya’s. Nor was this the end of the family’s expansion. The leading Bolshevik F. A. Sergeev, alias Artëm, perished in a plane crash in July 1921 leaving a young son. It was the custom in the party for such orphans to be fostered by other Bolsheviks, and this is what the Stalins did. The lad Artëm Sergeev lived with them until manhood (and became a major-general in the Red Army in the Second World War).17 Stalin also interested himself in the upbringing of Nikolai Patolichev, the son of a comrade who reportedly had died in his arms in the Soviet–Polish War of 1920.18 Young Patolichev was not brought into the family. Nevertheless in the space of a few months the Stalin household had grown in number from two to five.
Nadya brought in domestic assistance while her busy husband focused his energies on politics. She hired a nanny for Vasili; she also employed servants. She herself was like a terrier in getting raw materials for the kitchen. The Kremlin administrative regime, run by Stalin’s old friend Abel Enukidze, assigned a quota of food products for each resident family. Joseph, whose health had troubled him throughout the Civil War, had been recommended a diet with plenty of poultry. As a result he had acquired the monthly right to fifteen chickens, a head of cheese and fifteen pounds of potatoes. By mid-March 1921, days before the new baby was due, the family had already eaten its way through ten of its fifteen chickens. (Either the birds were unusually small and thin or the Stalins had the appetite of horses.) Nadya wrote a request for an increased quota.19 (Even before she married Joseph she had known how to handle the Soviet bureaucracy: in November 1918, after the Alliluevs moved to Moscow, she wrote to Yakov Sverdlov asking for a better room for them.)20 In later years she made further pleas. One of them was a request for a new kindergarten; she was turned down on that occasion.21
Nadya’s wish to work outside the home was conventional among young Bolshevik women, who combined a dedication to the revolutionary cause and to women’s emancipation. She did not object to supervising household management so long as she had servants and could continue to be employed in Lenin’s office. The double role was very heavy and the lack of support from Joseph made it scarcely bearable. He was frequently late in getting back to the Kremlin flat. He was uncouth in manners and had an obscene tongue when irritated. Nor was his language confined to phrases like ‘Go to the Devil!’ Hating to be contradicted, he used the foulest swear-words on his wife. His rough manner was extreme, and it cannot be discounted that he was compensating to some degree for personal insecurities. After hurting his arm as a boy, he had been unable to join in the normal rough-and-tumbles of childhood. He had been rejected on physical grounds by the Imperial Army in the Great War. Stalin wanted to be thought a man’s man. In fact, according to his grand-nephew Vladimir Alliluev, he had carefully manicured nails and ‘almost a woman’s fingers’.22 Did he have some residual doubts about his manliness by contemporary criteria? If he did, it was Nadya who paid the price.
Like most of his male contemporaries, Stalin expected a wife to obey. Here he was disappointed, for Nadya refused to be meek. Disputes between them were frequent more or less from the start of their sustained cohabitation. She too had her moods. Indeed it is now clear that she had mental problems. Perhaps they were hereditary. Schizophrenia of some kind seems to have affected previous generations of her mother’s side of the family; and her brother Fëdor, after an acutely traumatic event after the Civil War when the former bank robber Kamo stage-managed a scene in which he threatened to shoot him, had a breakdown from which he never recovered.23 Nadya had a volatile temperament and, although she remained in love with Joseph, the marriage continued to be rancorous between the patches of tranquillity.
Someone in the central party apparatus decided that Nadya was unsuitable for party membership. The rumour was that it was none other than Joseph. In December 1921 she was excluded from the party: this was a disgrace for anyone working as she did in the offices of Sovnarkom. Eventually she could have lost her job. The charge was that she had not passed the various tests applied to all party members and had not bothered to prepare herself for them. Nor had she helped with mundane party work; this was all the less acceptable inasmuch as she was ‘a person of the intelligentsia’. Only one Central Control Commission member spoke up for her even though Lenin himself had written warmly in her support.24 Nadya begged for another chance and promised to make a greater effort in the way that was demanded. Initially the decision was made to ‘exclude her as ballast, completely uninterested in party work’; but finally the Central Control Commission allowed her to keep the secondary status of a ‘candidate’ party member.25She could have done without this contretemps in a year full of problems; but at least the eventual decision enabled her to go on working for Lenin’s office without a blemish on her record.
It cannot be proved that Joseph had been behind the move to take away her party card; and Nadya never expressly blamed him. But he belonged to the Politburo and the Orgburo and was already intervening in the Secretariat’s work in 1921:26 he could have put in a good word for her if he had wanted. But she had survived. Stalin accepted the situation and avoided interfering with her professional aspirations again. She functioned as one of Lenin’s secretaries even while Lenin and Stalin were falling out. Krupskaya even asked her to liaise with Kamenev on Lenin’s behalf about the Georgian Affair.27 It would be strange if Nadya kept this a secret from her husband. Perhaps he at last began to see the advantages of having a working wife.
At home Nadya was a severe mother and denied to the children the open affection she directed at Joseph. Strict standards of behaviour were enforced. Yakov, who hardly knew his father before moving to Moscow, reacted badly to this. Joseph’s work kept him away from the apartment and the bond between them never solidified. Such interest as he took in his son tended to involve pressure. He pushed books at him and expected him to read them. ‘Yasha!’ he wrote on the cover of B. Andreev’s The Conquest of Nature, ‘Read this book without fail!’28 But it was Nadya who had to handle Yakov on a daily basis and, as her letter to Joseph’s mother in October 1922 indicated, she found him exasperating:29
I send you a big kiss and pass on greetings from Soso: he’s very healthy, feels very well, works hard, and remembers about you.
Yasha [i.e. Yakov] studies, plays up, smokes and doesn’t listen to me. Vasenka [i.e. Vasili] also plays up, insults his mama and also won’t listen to me. He hasn’t yet started smoking. Joseph will definitely teach him to since he always give him a puff on hispapiroska.
A papiroska is a cigarette with an empty tube at the end which acts like a cigarette-holder to allow smoking while wearing gloves in sub-zero temperatures. It was in character for Joseph to expect Nadya to enforce discipline while he himself disrupted it.
Life nevertheless had its pleasant side. The Stalins lived in two places after the Soviet–Polish War: their Kremlin flat and the dacha they called Zubalovo near the old sawmill at Usovo outside Moscow. By a bizarre coincidence, the dacha’s owner had belonged to the Zubalishvili business family which had built the hostel that became the Tiflis Spiritual Seminary. Probably it tickled the fancy of Stalin and his neighbour Mikoyan that they were living in homes put up by an industrialist from the south Caucasus against whom they had once helped to lead strikes.30
Several dachas were made state property in the same district in 1919 and the Stalins occupied Zubalovo-4. Stalin, who had never had a house of his own,31 cleared the trees and bushes to turn his patch into a spot to his liking. Near by was the River Moskva, where the children could swim in the summer. It was a beautiful spot which might have appeared in the plays of Anton Chekhov; but whereas Chekhov described how the old rural gentry were supplanted by the nouveaux riches, this was a case of the nouveaux riches being expelled by revolutionaries. While gloating over the Zubalishvilis’ forced departure, Stalin had no inhibition about creating a style of life that was similarly bourgeois. When they could, the entire Stalin family went out to Zubalovo. They gathered honey. They searched for mushrooms and wild strawberries. Joseph took pot-shots at pheasants and rabbits and the family ate what he killed. The Stalins kept open house and visitors stayed as long as they wanted. Budënny and Voroshilov often popped over to drink and sing with Joseph. Ordzhonikidze and Bukharin were others who spent time there. Gentle-mannered Bukharin was a particular favourite with Nadya and the children: he even brought a tame grey fox with him and did a painting of the trees by the dacha.32
In the summers they holidayed in the south of the USSR, usually in one of the many state dachas by the Black Sea. Stalin had material couriered to him whenever he needed to be consulted. But he knew how to enjoy himself. There were always plenty of Caucasian dishes and wines on his table and the visitors were many. Georgian and Abkhazian politicians queued to ingratiate themselves. His Moscow cronies, if they were staying in nearby dachas, called on the family; and picnics were arranged in the hills or by the seaside. Although Stalin could not swim, he loved the fresh air and the beach as well.
He also used the vacations as a time to allow his body to recuperate. Joseph’s health had always troubled him and since 1917 he had resorted to various traditional cures. The rheumatism in his arm and his bothersome cough – probably caused by his pipe-smoking – figured often in his letters.33 Once he had stopped at Nalchik high up in the north Caucasus. It was a place visited by tuberculosis patients.34 But Stalin’s specific complaints were different; and for his rheumatism, which affected his arm every spring, he was advised by Mikoyan to try the hot baths at Matsesta near Sochi on the Black Sea coast.35 Stalin tried this and found the waters at Matsesta to work ‘a lot better than the Essentuki muds’.36 Essentuki was one of the spa towns of the north Caucasus famous for the medical benefits of its soil. Stalin mostly, in any case, preferred to go to Sochi for his summer vacations.37 From 1926 he put himself in the hands of Dr Ivan Valedinski, a great believer in ‘balneology’. When Stalin made his way south in the summer, he pocketed instructions from Valedinski: he was told to take a dozen baths at Matsesta before returning home. Stalin asked for permission to enliven his stay with a glass or two of brandy at weekends. Valedinski was stern: Stalin could take a glass on Saturdays but definitely not on Sundays.38
Perhaps the doctor forgot that Sundays were not sacred for an atheist. In any case Stalin was never a trusting patient; he had his own pack of medicines and used them as he saw fit regardless of advice from doctors.39 It is doubtful that he went along with everything that Valedinski specified. But undoubtedly he felt better than earlier. The hot baths eased the pain in his joints and the aspirin prescribed by Valedinski reduced the pain in his neck. A heart check-up in 1927 confirmed him as generally robust.40
More worrisome to Stalin than his recurrent ill health were his growing difficulties with Nadya. Periods of calm and tenderness were interrupted by explosions of mutual irritation. Nadya and the children spent time with him in the south; and she and Joseph wrote to each other if for some reason she could not stay there.41 Her absence became normal once she started a student’s course at the Industrial Academy: the beginning of term coincided with her husband’s annual holiday leave. Their letters to each other were tender. He called her Tatka and she called him Joseph. She was solicitous about him: ‘I very much beg you to look after yourself. I kiss you deeply, deeply, as you kissed me when we said goodbye.’42 She also wrote to his mother on Joseph’s behalf, giving news of the children and passing on little details about life in Moscow. Stalin himself wrote to Georgia only infrequently. He was too preoccupied with political business, and anyway he had hardly bothered about his blood relatives for many years. Usually his letters to his mother were brief to the point of curtness and ended with a phrase such as ‘Live a thousand years!’43 Nadya was doing her best for him, but she could never get the appreciation and understanding from her husband that she craved.
His harshness would have demoralised the most optimistic spirit. Nadya’s mental condition worsened and she was given to episodes of despair. Stalin’s flirtations with other women probably played a part in this. On the secretarial staff of the Politburo was a beautiful young woman, Tamara Khazanova, who befriended Nadya; she came round to the Kremlin flat and helped with the children. At some point it would seem that Stalin took a fancy to her and pursued his interest.44
Nadya descended into gloom. She expressed her thoughts in a letter to her friend Maria Svanidze, the sister of Joseph’s first wife:45
You write that you’re bored. You know, dearest, that it’s the same everywhere. I have absolutely nothing to do with anyone in Moscow. Sometimes it seems strange after so many years to have no close friends, but this obviously depends on one’s character. Moreover, it’s strange that I feel myself closer to non-members of the party (women, of course). The obvious explanation is that such people are simpler.
I greatly regret tying myself down again in new family matters. In our day this isn’t very easy because generally a lot of the new prejudices are strange and if you don’t work, then you’re looked upon as an ‘old woman’.
‘New family matters’ was Nadya’s odd way of referring to her latest pregnancy. Because of this she had to delay getting the requisite qualifications for professional employment. Enrolment on some training course remained her ambition. She told Maria to take the same attitude or else spend her time running errands for others.46
The child she was expecting was born on 28 February 1926; it was a girl, and they named her Svetlana. Nadya, however, remained determined to free herself of domesticity and in autumn 1929 she got herself enrolled at the Industrial Academy in central Moscow on a course specialising in artificial fibres. The Stalin household was left to servants and nannies.
Each morning she left the Kremlin and made for the Industrial Academy. She left behind all privilege. She was also leaving a middle-aged environment and joining people of her own age. Most of the students were unaware that Nadya Allilueva was the wife of the Party General Secretary – and even if they knew this, they did not act much differently towards her. Off set Nadya without chauffeur or bodyguard, taking the same forms of transport as her fellow students. She wrote to Joseph about a very tedious journey on 12 September 1929:47
Today I can say that things are better since I had an exam in written maths which went well but in general everything is not so successful. To be precise, I had to be at the I[ndustrial] A[cademy] by nine o’clock and of course I left home at 8.30, and what happens but the tram has broken down. I started to wait for a bus, but there wasn’t one and so I decided to take a taxi so as not to be late. I got into it and, blow me, we’d only gone 100 yards and the taxi came to a halt; something in it as well had gone bust.
While claiming to find this catalogue of service breakdowns funny she pleaded a bit too hard for this to convince. Nadya had high standards in everything and was annoyed by the deterioration in conditions. She was making sure that Joseph learned something about the kind of life facing ordinary metropolitan inhabitants: the noise, mess and disorder.48
Even Joseph sometimes encountered such unpleasantness for himself. On one occasion in the late 1920s he and Molotov were walking outside the Kremlin on some business or other. Molotov never forgot what ensued:49
I remember a heavy storm; the snow was piling up and Stalin and I were walking across the Manège. We had no bodyguard. Stalin was wearing a fur coat, long boots and a hat with ear-flaps. No one knew who he was. Suddenly a beggar stuck to us: ‘Give us some money, good sirs!’ Stalin reached into his pocket, pulled out a ten-ruble note and handed it to him, and we walked on. The beggar, though, yelled after us: ‘Ah, you damned bourgeois!’ This made Stalin laugh: ‘Just try and understand our people. If you give them a little, it’s bad; if you give them a lot, it’s also bad!’
But generally he was insulated from experiences of this kind.
What worried Nadya, though, was that he had cut himself off from a sustained family commitment. He was bad-tempered and domineering at home. She suspected him of having flings with attractive women who came his way. And he otherwise seldom thought of anything but politics. He felt fulfilled not in their Kremlin flat or at Zubalovo but in his office a few hundred yards across Red Square on Old Square. This was where the Central Committee was situated from 1923. He had his office on an upper floor near Molotov, Kaganovich and others.50 Stalin spent most of the day and often a large part of the evening there. Nadya did not nag him about being left on her own, but she did feel that his behaviour at home – when he was there – left a lot to be desired. Her unhappiness was understandable. Stalin had no interests outside work and study apart from the occasional hunting expedition. Unlike Molotov and his other cronies, he did not play tennis or skittles. He did not even go to the cinema. The marriage of Joseph and Nadya looked like a divorce waiting to happen.