Stalin became ever more isolated from daily life in the USSR as concern for his personal security grew. He no longer kept open office in the Secretariat. He visited no collective farm. While on vacation in Abkhazia allegedly he once went to inspect a market; but the Sukhum authorities, eager to impress him, got the stallholders to lower their prices for the duration of his visit: thus he was prevented from discovering the high cost of living.1 In any case, he never inspected the factories and mines being constructed; and when he went to inspect the White Sea Canal, his trip was announced in the press only days after it had taken place.2 The OGPU had picked up a potential assassin, Yakov Ogarëv, outside the Kremlin in November 1931. Ogarëv, however, had been so surprised by Stalin’s unexpected appearance on Red Square that he failed to pull out his revolver.3 Security concerns alone did not explain Stalin’s withdrawal from view. The fact was that he had set up a political structure which no longer required him to get out and about. Whether in the Kremlin office or at his dachas, he could give his orders and prod his subordinates into carrying them out.
Political cloistering did nothing to lessen the strains in his family. His son Yakov tried to kill himself in 1929; it was a botched attempt which earned Stalin’s contempt rather than sympathy. Marital relations with Nadya were tense. He was extremely gruff to her and never admitted to fault. Quite possibly Stalin continued to have the odd fling with young communists; and, even if he was faithful to Nadya, she did not always believe him and was driven mad with jealousy. Yet it had never been his way to compromise in personal relationships, least of all with women. Joseph’s attitudes were not the only reason why she got angry. Another factor was her mental condition. Although its precise nature remains unclear, probably it would nowadays be categorised as some kind of schizophrenia. Days of quietude alternated with explosive aggression. Stalin could never be sure what awaited him in the Kremlin flat or at the Zubalovo dacha – and his insensitivity to her plight was driving her to despair. Nadya had always been strong-willed. Stalin had been the love of her life, and, unlike others in her family, she did not have extramarital dalliances. Feeling rejected and underappreciated, she could take it no more in 1926 and decamped to Leningrad, intending to divorce Joseph.4
Yet she yielded to his pleadings and gave the marriage another try. She wanted no more children; according to her daughter, she had already had two abortions.5 Stalin had not obstructed her from registering as a student at the Industrial Academy. Letters between husband and wife were tender. His routine was established: every summer he would go to the south of the RSFSR. Usually the destination was Sochi on the northeast coast of the Black Sea. Nadya filled her letters with news of the children, the household, the weather and her progress as a student.
The Stalins decided to consult over her mental condition with foreign medical experts. Since the Treaty of Rapallo in 1922 it had been normal for members of the Soviet elite to go to German clinics and spas. Stalin was one of the few who spurned this privilege; distrusting doctors and disliking foreign countries, he never considered travelling abroad for his healthcare. Georgi Chicherin, his Foreign Affairs Commissar, rebuked him: ‘How good it would be if you, Stalin, were to change your appearance and travel for a certain time abroad with a genuine interpreter rather than a tendentious one. Then you’d see reality!’6 But Stalin approved of Nadya’s trip. No less than his wife, he urgently wanted her to get cured. Even for her, however, permission had to come from on high. The Party Orgburo and Secretariat took from April to July 1930 to process her request, supported by her physicians in Moscow, to spend a month in Germany. The final sanction was signed by Stalin, Molotov, Kaganovich and I. N. Smirnov.7 Stalin arranged for Nadya to send him personal letters through the diplomatic post.8 She met her brother Pavel and his wife Yevgenia on her trip; and after seeing the doctors she returned in time for the start of the Industrial Academy term in September.9
The medical papers are missing;10 but according to Nadya’s niece Kira Allilueva the diagnosis was a fusion of the cranial seams.11 Joseph wrote affectionate letters to her. Throughout these months – before, during and after her journey – he used the sentimental code they had developed over the years, dropping particular letters from phrases like ‘deep kisses many times’.12
Her health, though, did not improve. In 1932 she turned to Soviet physicians for advice on what appear to have been abdominal complaints. It has been mooted that they resulted from an earlier abortion.13 What seems to have happened is that a planned surgical operation was postponed on medical grounds. This was what she confided to her Kremlin maid Alexandra Korchagina.14 Nadya fretted as much as ever; and although she made no further attempt to break free from her husband, the marriage remained an unsettled one. He could hardly be bothered with her. In a period where he and his propagandists were touting the importance of films, Joseph did not bestir himself by taking her to the cinema. When he was not drinking with his uncouth comrades, he went on flirting with women. The children brought no solace to Nadya. Severe and demanding, she gave them little of the cuddling normal in other families. Only when they were apart did Joseph and Nadya get back on affectionate terms. This was little comfort for a woman who was expected to give the maximum of psychological support to her husband without ever being able to count on his reciprocation.
Nadya did not limit her assistance to family matters but also supported him politically. Stories spread that, like her confidant Bukharin, she detested the agricultural collectivisation campaign. In fact she was a wife who jealously guarded her husband’s political position. On 2 May 1931 she wrote to Sergo Ordzhonikidze about Industrial Academy affairs. Her claim was that Stalin’s injunction for the right sort of ‘technical specialists’ to be trained was being ignored. Yet she insisted that her fellow students were not to know and the letter was to be destroyed.15 She was snitching on people in the Industrial Academy in support of the line of the country’s ruling clique.
Yet the dual problems of her medical condition and her relationship with Joseph had her on the brink of eruption. The only surprise is that no one properly understood this. Close friends like Tamara Khazanova (by now married to Andrei Andreev) and Molotov’s wife Polina Zhemchuzhina knew of her troubles but failed to understand the depths of her misery. Nadya felt terribly lonely. She found certain kinds of social situation very disturbing. She tended to get distressed when Joseph got together with his cronies and their wives. The ruling group’s tradition was to gather for supper at the Voroshilovs’ Kremlin flat for a celebration of the October Revolution anniversary on 7 November. (Sovnarkom had adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1918, moving the date by thirteen days and thereby changing the month in which the Revolution had taken place.) Always there was excessive drinking and a lot of crude banter. In 1932 Nadya made a special effort to dress up to look her best. It made no difference to Joseph’s behaviour. Late in the evening he flirted with the wife of Alexander Yegorov, who had served with him in the Soviet–Polish War. Natalya Yegorova was wearing a glamorous frock and behaving coquettishly. Apparently he did his crude trick of rolling a bit of bread into a ball and flicking it at her. Nadya was seized with jealousy, and stormed out of the gathering. Witnesses dismissively put this down to her ‘Gipsy blood’.16
There are other versions of what happened before she left. One story has it that Stalin yelled across at Nadya using the familiar ‘you’ form in Russian and that she took exception to this. Another is that he threw a lighted cigarette at her. But the likeliest version is that he was indeed making eyes at Natalya Yegorova and that Nadya could take it no longer. What happened next is more definitely recorded. Polina Zhemchuzhina ran after her into the cold night air. Nadya was extraordinarily tense and Polina walked her around the Kremlin grounds in an attempt to calm her down. Then Nadya went by herself to the family flat while Polina went back to the party.17
Nadya’s thoughts plunged into existential darkness. Some years previously her brother had made her the present of a gun; despite looking like a toy pistol (as Stalin later recalled), it was a lethal weapon.18 Seating herself on the bed, she pointed it at her heart and shot herself. Her corpse was found by the morning maid. The panicking household staff made a call to Abel Enukidze. As Central Committee member and administrator of the Kremlin site, he would have the authority to decide on appropriate action. As it happened, Enukidze was also Nadya’s godfather.19 Without hesitation he ordered that Stalin should be roused. The Stalins had taken to sleeping in separate rooms and Joseph was seemingly unaware of the consequences of his misbehaviour the night before. Doctors were summoned to ascertain the cause of death. This was not going to be a lengthy task: Nadya had shot herself through the heart. When Professors Rozanov and Kushner carried out the postmortem after midday, the body was laid out on the bed. Near by was the small revolver. Death must have been instantaneous and, they concluded, had occurred eight to ten hours previously. Nadya had taken her own life. Rozanov and Kushner started to write their brief report at one o’clock.
The politicians were deciding what to reveal to the public.20 It was thought inappropriate to tell the truth for fear of diminishing Stalin’s prestige. Instead Pravda was asked to state that Nadya had died of the effects of appendicitis. Wives of the most prominent leaders signed a letter of condolence to Stalin. This too was published in the newspaper. A funeral commission was selected, headed by Abel Enukidze. There was to be a cortège behind a horse-drawn carriage carrying her coffin. The mourners would gather on Red Square at three o’clock in the afternoon on 12 November and would walk across the city to the Novodevichi Monastery Cemetery. Such occasions were cause for official concern, and the OGPU was put in charge of the organisation and security of the proceedings. Orchestras were to be supplied by the OGPU and the Red Army. A short ceremony was to take place at the graveside. There would be two speakers: Kaganovich as Moscow City Committee Party Secretary and Kalashnikov, a representative from the Industrial Academy where she had been studying.21 Stalin left the details to others. His public appearance on the day of the funeral was going to be an ordeal, and he did not volunteer to give a eulogy before the coffin was interred.
Despite what many subsequently suggested, he attended the ceremony. The cortège of mourners made its way on foot through the city. It was a day without snow. Crowds lined the streets. At the cemetery the open coffin was taken from the carriage and lowered into the hard earth. Kaganovich’s oration briefly mentioned the deceased and ended with a request that communist party members should carry out the duties falling to them as a consequence of Stalin’s personal loss. Kalashnikov gave a eulogy to Nadya as a fine and dedicated student.22 The funeral was over within minutes. Stalin and his comrades returned by limousine to the Kremlin. A simple tombstone was erected over Nadya’s grave, where it remains to this day.
When the Industrial Academy approached Stalin for permission to examine her working materials, he immediately consented and asked Anna Allilueva, Nadya’s sister, to expedite this. Not for Stalin the usual possessiveness of the widower. He told Anna to inspect the safe with the assistance of Tamara Khazanova.23 Nadya’s daughter Svetlana was to claim that a suicide note was left behind; but Svetlana learned only many years later that her mother had died by her own hand, and her memoirs are anyway not always reliable. It anyway can hardly be assumed that such a note would necessarily explain everything. What is clear is that the official clampdown on information in 1932 served only to feed the growth of rumours. In diplomatic circles it was bruited that she had committed suicide.24 Gossip was intense within the walls of the Kremlin. This was dangerous activity. Alexandra Korchagina, the maid of Joseph and Nadya, was denounced by other Kremlin domestic staff for saying that Stalin had killed her; she was sentenced to three years’ corrective labour on the White Sea–Baltic Canal. Korchagina claimed that it was her own denouncers who had made such a statement about Stalin.25 The denouncers themselves were arrested in the 1935 clear-out of Kremlin auxiliary staff.26
Indisputably Stalin was deeply shaken. ‘I was a bad husband,’ he admitted to Molotov: ‘I never had time to take her to the cinema.’27 This was hardly a full recognition of the scale of assistance he would have needed to give Nadya. But it signalled a degree of remorse. Significantly it also implied that circumstances, rather than his own demeanour, determined his contribution to the tragedy. He was also thinking as much about himself as about his deceased wife. His self-centredness grew. Within a few weeks he was blaming her directly and worrying about the fate of their children. The attempt on his own life by young Yakov Dzhughashvili came back to mind, and at a dinner with his friends he blurted out: ‘How could Nadya, who so much condemned Yasha for such a step, go off and shoot herself? She did a very bad thing: she made a cripple out of me.’ Alexander Svanidze, his brother-in-law by his first marriage, tried to mollify him by asking how she could leave her two children motherless. Stalin was angry: ‘Why the children? They forgot her within a few days: it’s me she made a cripple for life!’ But then he proposed: ‘Let’s drink to Nadya!’28
Steadily he came to take a less charitable view of Nadya’s suicide:29
The children grew up without their mother, that was the trouble. Nannies, governesses – however ideal they might have been – could not replace their mother for them. Ah, Nadya, Nadya, what did you do and how much I and the children needed you!
He focused his thoughts on the harm done to the children and, above all, to himself. Sinking into introspection, he confided in no one. He told the children that their mother had died of natural causes. Tough and icy though he was in outward behaviour, Stalin’s inner mood was touchy.
For some weeks there were worries that he too might do away with himself. He was pale and inattentive to his daily needs. His characteristic earthy sense of humour disappeared. It was weeks before he started to pull himself around. Seeking companionship, he turned to his Politburo associates. Kirov was a particular chum. Whenever Kirov was on a trip from Leningrad, he went to see the Ordzhonikidzes; but frequently Stalin called him over to his place and Kirov slept there overnight.30 Mikoyan was also frequently invited. This caused embarrassment for Mikoyan, whose wife Ashken was not easily persuaded that he really was staying where he said. Soon Mikoyan had to start declining Stalin’s requests, and Stalin turned to Alexander Svanidze.31 He sorely needed the reassurance and company of familiar individuals. The Soviet Union’s ruler was a lonely widower. According to Lazar Kaganovich, he was never the same man again. He turned in on himself and hardened his attitude to people in general.32 He drank and ate more, sometimes sitting at the table for three or four hours after putting in a full day in his office.33
Yet he did not yet take things out on the family and friends of his late wife. (That came later.) The Alliluevs tried to stay in touch with him without presuming too much upon his time and convenience. Nadya’s father Sergei wrote to him to ask whether he might still go and stay at the Zubalovo dacha. He was in poor health and hoped to convalesce in the countryside.34 The request, written two months after Nadya’s death, tugged Stalin out of his self-absorption. Indeed it exasperated him: ‘Sergei! You’re a strange person! What sort of “permission” do you need when you have the full right to come and reside in “Zubalovo” without any “permission”!’35 He welcomed other members of the Alliluev family, and Yevgenia – Nadya’s sister-in-law – made efforts to see that he had a social life. The Svanidzes too popped by to see him whenever they could. Blood ran thicker than water both for Stalin and them.
Yet Zubalovo offered reminders of his married years. Another dacha outside Moscow seemed a sensible idea, and Stalin discovered an architect with ideas he found congenial. Miron Merzhanov designed country houses with thick, gloomy walls as if they were intended to stand as impregnable fortresses. Without Nadya to dissuade him, Stalin commissioned a residence serving better as a work place than as a family home. A rural spot was found near Kuntsevo, west of Moscow. It was only seven miles from the Kremlin and could be reached within minutes by official limousine. Stalin got the dacha he wanted. There was a large hall for meetings as well as several bedrooms and rooms for afternoon tea, billiards and film-shows. The construction was complete by 1934; Stalin quickly set himself up there and ceased to sleep in the Kremlin flat. The dacha became known as Blizhnyaya (‘Nearby Dacha’). Another was built further out and called Dalnyaya (‘Distant Dacha’), but Blizhnyaya was his favourite. Merzhanov had to be patient with his patron. No sooner had Blizhnyaya gone up than Stalin demanded alterations, even to the extent of requiring a second storey to be added.36 He was forever thinking of ways to make the little rural castle into his dream.
His was a restless and unhappy spirit. Although he lived by choice apart from his family, he was not comfortable with being on his own; and Moscow, where he had spent most years of his second marriage, was never going to allow him to forget the past. He looked forward keenly to his vacations in the south. Although he and Nadya had holidayed there together, her student obligations had latterly kept her in Moscow. State dachas already existed along the coast between Sochi and Sukhum, and Merzhanov was kept busy with commissions to design new ones.
Nearly all Stalin’s vacations after 1932 took place in Abkhazia. Although he lived alone in the various local dachas, he spent his time convivially. The wine flowed and his tables groaned with food. His boon companion was Nestor Lakoba. In the factional disputes of the 1920s Lakoba had kept the Communist Party of Georgia clear of oppositionist influence. He had fought in the Civil War and was a crack shot with a hunting rifle; it amused Stalin that Lakoba put the Red Army commanders to shame when they went out hunting in the mountains.37 Lakoba, moreover, had been an orphan and – like Stalin – had had a difficult childhood; and he too had studied at the Tiflis Spiritual Academy.38 He was a bluff Caucasian who saw to it that Stalin was given the leisure to enjoy the delights of the Caucasus: the scenery, the wildlife, the wines and the cuisine. Even when Stalin stayed in Sochi, over the Abkhazian border in the RSFSR, Lakoba would come to visit. In 1936 when Lakoba got into political trouble with higher party authority in the Transcaucasian Federation and was stripped of the right to leave Sukhum without permission, Stalin was furious. Whatever might be the local political intrigues, he wanted the company of Nestor Lakoba.39
The first holiday after Nadya’s death was memorable in more ways than one. On 23 September 1933 Stalin and his bodyguards took a boat trip off Sukhum. Suddenly they were subjected to rifle fire from the coast. His chief bodyguard Nikolai Vlasik threw himself on top of Stalin to protect him and requested permission to return fire. Meanwhile the boatman steered away from the area. The immediate assumption was that this had been an attempt at assassination; but the truth turned out to be more mundane. The Abkhazian NKVD had been suspicious of a boat which did not come from the locality and assumed that foreigners were up to no good. The coastguards owned up and pleaded for mercy, and Stalin recommended that they should suffer only disciplinary measures. (In the Great Terror the case was dug up and they were either shot or sent to forced-labour camps.)40
Stalin’s power and eminence attracted attention from politicians in the south Caucasus. His presence was a heaven-sent opportunity to impress him. Among those who yearned to be taken up by Stalin was Lavrenti Beria. In 1933 he was First Secretary of the Party Transcaucasian Committee and one bright summer’s morning found an excuse to visit Stalin before breakfast at a Black Sea dacha. Beria was too late. Stalin was already down in the bushes below the buildings and, when Beria caught his first glimpse of him, he saw to his chagrin that Stalin was accompanied by Lakoba. Not that this inhibited Beria from toadying. After breakfast Stalin remarked: ‘That wild bush needs clearing out, it gets in the way of the garden.’ But efforts to remove the roots failed until Beria, snatching an axe off a Muscovite visitor, applied himself. Beria made sure Stalin heard him saying: ‘I can chop under the roots of any bush which the owner of this garden, Joseph Vissarionovich, might point to.’41 He was almost volunteering himself as a purger for Stalin. Few of these convivial encounters were without political content. Stalin, even on holiday, could not insulate himself from the ambitions of intriguers.
Yet most of his visitors were party and government functionaries of the region. No one, not even Molotov or Kaganovich, was a chum as Kirov had been; and Lakoba was more like a seasonal landlord than a genuine intimate. Having put up barricades against psychological intrusion, Stalin restricted himself to playful recreation. He took nieces and nephews on his knee. He sang Orthodox liturgical chants by the piano. He went hunting, challenged visitors to games of billiards and welcomed the presence of female relatives. But he had got harder as a personality. Ice had entered his soul. Molotov and Kaganovich, who immensely admired him, could not work out what made him tick. They later said that he changed a lot after Nadya’s death. But the same works emphasise what made him exceptional: will power, clarity of vision, endurance and courage. Always Molotov and Kaganovich were observing him from the outside. They were in awe of Stalin. While they too were wilful and determined, they appreciated someone who had these qualities to a unique level of intensity. When he acted oddly, they gave him the benefit of the doubt. They thought he had earned the right to any psychological peculiarity by the services he had rendered to the USSR.
Most of them until the late 1930s felt no reason to query the mental condition of their Leader. Doubtless Stalin had previously driven them to distraction with orders to intensify political and economic campaigns. Yet the policies had been those of the ascendant party leadership and the negative side of Stalin’s personality was largely overlooked. Earlier acquaintances had been more perceptive. Fellow pupils in Gori and Tbilisi as well as many party comrades before 1917 had remarked on his hypertrophied sense of importance and his excessive tendency to take offence. And when Lenin used him as Political Commissar in the Civil War or as Party General Secretary, he knew that Stalin would need careful handling if his volatility and crudity were not to damage the interests of the Revolution. Then in the early 1930s Stalin started to demand capital punishment for his adversaries in the communist party. If Nadya’s suicide changed him, it was only to push him down a road he had been travelling his whole life long.