The German invasion deprived Stalin of the presence of his family. His sons Yakov and Vasili were on war service. Yakov was a lieutenant in the 14th Armoured Division, Vasili a very young air force commander. Yakov suffered a terrible fate. Captured near Vitebsk by the Wehrmacht in 1941, his identity was discovered and he was kept as a prized prisoner. Hitler sanctioned an offer to ransom him for one of the leading German generals. The Germans interrogated him in the hope of hearing things which might be used to embarrass his father. Yakov, despite his youthful misdemeanours, proved a stoical inmate and stood up for Stalin and the USSR. Stalin endured the situation and refused the German proposal point blank. Yet the situation deeply troubled him; he asked Svetlana to stay in his bedroom for several successive nights.1 Only Zhukov dared to enquire after Yakov. Stalin walked about a hundred paces before replying in a lowered voice that he did not expect Yakov to survive captivity. Later at the dining table he pushed aside his food and declared with a rare intimacy: ‘No, Yakov will prefer any death to the betrayal of the Motherland. What a terrible war! How many lives of our people has it taken away! Obviously we’ll have few families without relatives who have perished.’2
Order No. 270, which had been edited and sharpened by Stalin,3 prohibited Soviet servicemen from allowing themselves to be taken prisoner. Red Army POWs were automatically categorised as traitors. Yet Stalin exempted his son Yakov from blame. Nevertheless the iron was in his soul: he wanted the policy of no surrender to be taken seriously and could not afford to be seen indulging his son.
The relationship between Stalin and his sons had been poor long before the war. Yakov had continued to annoy his father, even refusing to join the communist party. Stalin sent for him and remonstrated: ‘And you are my son! What do I look like? Me, the General Secretary of the Central Committee? You can have all the opinions you wish, but do think of your father. Do it for me.’ This argument got through to Yakov and he joined the party.4 But they saw little of each other and Stalin was never slow to issue reprimands. It was a similar situation with his younger son Vasili, who took more than the normal time to qualify for the officer corps in the Soviet air force (which was the favourite section of the armed forces for the offspring of Politburo members). It is said that Stalin complained: ‘You should long ago have got your diploma from the Military Academy.’ Vasili is reported to have lashed back: ‘Well, you haven’t got a diploma either.’5 Perhaps the story is apocryphal. But it has the sound of psychological truth. Stalin was always trying to impress others as a man who understood armies and military strategy. Only his son would have dared to point out the amateurish foundations of his military knowledge.
Until the war Svetlana had been the apple of his eye. Nadya’s strict standards of behaviour were relaxed after her death,6 and Svetlana was fussed over by tutors and housekeeper Katerina Til. A nurse combed her hair. The general oversight of her daily schedule, though, was handed to Stalin’s chief bodyguard Nikolai Vlasik.7 Stalin was too busy to see a lot of her; in any case his opinion was that ‘feelings were a matter for women’.8 What he wanted from his children was that they should be a delight for him on those occasions when they spent time together. He in turn wished to be fun for them. Yakov and Vasili did not meet these specifications: neither of them worked hard at school or behaved with the mixture of respect and levity that he required. But Svetlana fitted the bill. He penned letters to her pretending to be her ‘first secretary comrade Stalin’. She wrote out orders to him such as ‘I hereby command you to permit me to go to the theatre or cinema with you.’ To this he replied: ‘All right, I obey.’9 As Maria Svanidze, Stalin’s sister-in law from his first marriage, recorded in her diary for 1934, Svetlana adored him: ‘Svetlana rubbed against her father the whole time. He stroked her, kissed her, admired her and fed her from his own spoon, lovingly choosing the best titbits for her.’10
Relations between father and daughter deteriorated after Operation Barbarossa. By her mid-teens she was interested in men, and this brought out his ill-tempered side. When she showed him a photograph of herself in clothes he thought immodest (and he had strict ideas on this subject), he snatched it from her and ripped it up.11 He hated her wearing lipstick. When she wanted to stay overnight at the Berias’ dacha, where she was a frequent visitor, he ordered her to return home immediately: ‘I don’t trust Beria!’12Stalin was aware of Lavrenti Beria’s proclivities towards young women. Although it was Beria’s son Sergo she was visiting, Stalin took no chances and attached a security official – known to Svetlana as Uncle Klimov – to act as her chaperone.
Svetlana’s discomfort was increased by what she learned about her family’s history. Her aunt Anna told her, when she reached the age of sixteen, that her mother Nadya had not died of natural causes but had committed suicide. Svetlana was shocked by what she heard; her father had always avoided the topic.13 Anna did not tell Svetlana much more: she had already taken a large risk in breaching Stalin’s confidence. Svetlana proceeded to ask her father for further information. According to Sergo Beria, in whom she confided, Stalin’s response was hurtful. He resented the way Svetlana kept on examining pictures of Nadya. When she asked him whether her mother had been beautiful, he replied more insensitively: ‘Yes, except that she had teeth like a horse.’ He added that the other Alliluev women had wanted to sleep with him. This too may well have been true, but it was a painful message for Svetlana. He finished by explaining: ‘At least your mother was young, and she really loved me. That’s why I married her.’14
It was around this time that Svetlana started going out with film-writer Alexei Kapler. A more unsuitable boyfriend could not be imagined. Kapler was a womaniser who had had a string of affairs. He was over twice Svetlana’s age. He was also Jewish – and Stalin even before the war had been trying to identify himself and his family with the Russians. Kapler was incredibly indiscreet. He acquired Western films such as Queen Christina (starring Greta Garbo) and Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfsand showed them to Svetlana. He passed on books by Ernest Hemingway, who was then unpublished in the USSR. Kapler handed her – a girl who loved literature – copies of poems by Anna Akhmatova who had been in official disgrace before the war.
Kapler made Svetlana feel desirable as a woman, and she fell head over heels in love with him.15 Stalin, on hearing about developments from Vlasik, knew how things might turn out. Hadn’t he himself seduced girls in Siberia? Hadn’t he taken a woman half his age off to Tsaritsyn in 1918 and exploited his mature charms? Something had to be done. Stalin decided that the best thing – for once – was not to have the man arrested but to send him as a Pravda correspondent to the front at Stalingrad.16 It was mere coincidence that Kapler was to be sent to Stalingrad where Stalin and Nadya Allilueva had spent several months. Stalin wanted to give Kapler a fright by assigning him to the vicinity of direct military conflict. After the Great Terror such an intervention from the Kremlin was enough to scare the daylights out of anyone, but Kapler carried on regardless. Far from crumbling under the pressure, he sent articles to Moscow with obvious hints at his relationship with Svetlana. ‘At the moment in Moscow,’ he wrote in one of them, ‘doubtless the snow is falling. From your window is visible the jagged wall of the Kremlin.’ Such recklessness brought Svetlana to her senses and she cut contact with Kapler.17
But her heart remained with him and when he returned from Stalingrad they started to see each other again. They kissed and cuddled despite being accompanied by Uncle Klimov. Poor Klimov felt damned if he reported this and damned if he didn’t. On hearing what was happening, Vlasik angrily sent an official to order Kapler out of Moscow. Extraordinarily enough, though, Kapler told him to go to hell.
Stalin at last intervened. ‘I know everything,’ he said to Svetlana. ‘All your telephone conversations, here they are!’ He tapped his pocket, which was full of transcripts. He had never spoken so contemptuously to her. Glaring into her eyes, he shouted: ‘Your Kapler is an English spy; he’s been arrested!’ Svetlana shouted: ‘But I love him!’ Stalin lost his self-control and sneered: ‘You love him!’ He slapped her twice in the face. ‘Just think, nanny, what’s she’s come to! There’s such a war going on and she’s tied up with all this!’ A torrent of obscenities flowed from his lips until his anger had subsided.18 She broke with Kapler, and her father seemed to have got his way. But his victory was illusory. No sooner had she dropped Kapler than she turned her attention to Beria’s son Sergo. Sergo’s father and mother were horrified by the dangers which could arise from such a relationship, and told him to keep away from her. Sergo’s mother Nina was frank with Svetlana: ‘You are both young. You must get a job first. And he looks on you as a sister. He’ll never marry you.’19 Svetlana recognised reality and looked elsewhere. In spring 1944, after a brief courtship, she married one of her brother Vasili’s friends, Grigori Morozov. This time Stalin was more restrained. Although he refused to invite Morozov to the Blizhnyaya dacha, he let the marriage go ahead.
He could not control absolutely everything and, while a war was going on, did not try. Disappointed in his family, he let his thoughts turn back to Georgia and to his boyhood friends. He had never forgotten them despite years without direct contact. From the thousands of rubles in his unopened pay packets he made a money transfer to Petr Kapanadze, Grigol Glurzhidze and Mikhail Dzeradze. (He was characteristically precise: 40,000 rubles for the first and 30,000 each for the others.) The Supreme Commander signed himself Soso.20
He had gone on seeing old friends and relatives after Nadya’s suicide, but everyone noticed how lonely he was becoming. He welcomed the Alliluevs and Svanidzes to the Blizhnyaya dacha until the late 1930s. The Great Terror changed this. Stalin had Maria Svanidze arrested in 1939 and sent to a labour camp. Her husband Alexander Svanidze also fell victim to the NKVD: he had been arrested in 1937 and was shot in 1941. Alexander behaved with extraordinary courage under torture and refused to confess or beg for mercy. Although Stalin did not yet touch the closest relatives of his deceased second wife, their spouses were not so lucky. Stanisław Redens, Anna Allilueva’s husband, was arrested in 1938.21 Anna got permission to plead his case along with her parents in the presence of Stalin and Molotov. But on the day of their meeting her father Sergei Alliluev refused to go with them. Stalin took this badly and Redens’s fate was sealed.22 Even those among Stalin’s outer family who escaped incarceration lived in continuous dread of what might happen to them. Yet like everyone in the Kremlin elite, they were moths flying near to the light source; they were incapable of pulling themselves out of their orbits.
During the war there would have been little time for family conviviality even if Stalin had not already ravaged the lives of his relatives. Such hours as he got for relaxation – and they were few – were spent in the company of the commanders and politicians who happened to be at hand. These occasions were predominantly male affairs, and the drink was as lavishly provided as the food. Yet he rationed the evenings he devoted to pleasure. He focused his waking energies on leading the war effort.
That Stalin managed to cope with the intense physical pressures is remarkable. Through the 1930s he had experienced bouts of ill health. His neck artery went on troubling him. His blood circulation was monitored by a succession of doctors; but he distrusted nearly all of them: he had persuaded himself that hot mineral baths were the best cure for any ailments. In 1931 he had a bad throat inflammation just after taking the waters in Matsesta and had a temperature of 39°C. A streptococcal infection followed five years later. His personal physician Vladimir Vinogradov was worried enough to go off and consult other specialists about desirable treatment. Stalin was too sick to join in the New Year celebrations in 1937. Again in February 1940 he was struck down by a raging high temperature and the usual problem with the throat.23 Until 1941, however, he could count on lengthy breaks for recuperation. Usually he had spent several weeks by the Black Sea, giving his body time to recover from the punishing schedule he set himself in Moscow. This was not possible after Operation Barbarossa. Throughout the hostilities, except when he travelled to Yalta and Tehran to confer with the Allied leaders or when he made a much-publicised trip to the proximity of the front,24 Stalin stayed in Moscow or its environs. And he worked himself like a dog.
The strains were manifest. His hair turned grey. (Zhukov unreliably said it was white.)25 His eyes were baggy from insufficient sleep. Excessive smoking aggravated the growing problems of arteriosclerosis. Not that he would have listened to doctors’ advice to change his style of life. Tobacco and alcohol were his consolation, and anyway the medical experts who saw him are not known to have counselled an alteration in the way he lived. They feared to do this – or possibly they did not see much wrong with his behaviour: not every doctor in that period was as severe as their present-day successors. Relentlessly, therefore, Stalin was driving himself to an earlier grave than biological inheritance had prescribed for him.26
Stalin lived an odd life after his wife’s suicide, but others in his entourage had even odder ones. Beria was a rapist of young girls. Others in the Kremlin had a taste for women even though outright physical coercion was not involved. Abel Enukidze, executed in 1937, had been notorious for employing attractive young women whom he took to bed. Kalinin had a penchant for ballerinas, Bulganin for opera divas. Khrush-chëv was said to chase women on a regular basis. The sexual history of the Soviet elite included promiscuousness on the part of several leaders, and a few of them had not confined themselves to intercourse with women. Yezhov had been bisexual and found comfort sometimes with both the husband and wife in a marriage. Such individuals were using their political power to secure gratification. As they knew, they could be arrested at any time. Many of them also found relief in drink. Zhdanov and Khrushchëv were boozers on a heroic scale. An evening for them was not complete without a skinful of vodka and brandy, and Yezhov had often been drunk by the late morning. Terror brought odd individuals to the apex of the Soviet order and the pressure made them still odder.
It may seem surprising that they managed to function at all as politicians. But this would miss the point. Although they would have engaged in sexual and alcoholic excess even if they had not become Soviet politicians, undoubtedly they were also driven in this direction by the pressures – and dangers – of their jobs.
Stalin’s existence before Operation Barbarossa had been stolid by comparison, but it was not devoid of female companionship or heavy drinking. A plausible piece of gossip was that Stalin took a fancy to his deceased wife Nadya’s sister-in-law Yevgenia. She saw quite a lot of him in the months after the suicide. Another who did so was Maria Svanidze.27 This was not approved by Maria’s husband Alexander, who thought that it might lead to hanky-panky. Maria made no secret of the fact that she ‘loved Joseph and was attached to him’.28 She was good-looking and worked on stage as a singer:29 she could hardly help attracting Stalin’s attention. But it was Yevgenia who was most gossiped about. In fact Yevgenia, whose husband Pavel Alliluev died in 1938, quickly married an inventor called Nikolai Molochnikov. Although it is doubtful that she and Stalin had a sexual relationship, there remains the suspicion that Yevgenia went off with Molochnikov as a way of avoiding becoming more closely involved with Stalin. Her daughter Kira has said opaquely: ‘She got wed so as to defend herself.’30 But filial piety discouraged her from stating whether it was Stalin’s attentions that she wanted to escape. What is known is that Stalin subsequently rang her several times and that during the Second World War he asked her to accompany Svetlana and other relatives as they were evacuated from Moscow. Yevgenia refused his request on the ground that she had her own immediate family to think about.31
Rumours had other candidates as his lovers in the late 1930s; it was even said that he secretly married again. The person said to have been his wife was named as Rosa Kaganovich. This allegation was peddled by the German Nazi media. Supposedly Rosa was Lazar Kaganovich’s beautiful sister. It was a pack of lies. Lazar Kaganovich had only one sister, Rakhil, who died in the mid-1920s.32 Another suggestion was that it was Lazar Kaganovich’s daughter Maya whom Stalin took to bed. Certainly she was good-looking. But there is no credible evidence. Lazar Kaganovich was not a prude and had no reason as a pensioner to pretend that his daughter had had no relationship with Stalin if this was not true.33
What is beyond doubt is the kind of life enjoyed by Stalin among his male friends. He loved to sing with Molotov and Voroshilov accompanied by Zhdanov on the piano. Molotov came from a musical family and could play the violin and mandolin. When he had been in administrative exile in Vologda before the Great War, he had supplemented his convict’s allowance by joining a mandolin group which went round the local restaurants and cinema. Zhdanov too had a cultural hinterland and joined in the fun at the dacha, and Voroshilov had a decent voice. All had memorised church music as youngsters and, ignoring their atheistic commitment, performed the hymns they loved.34 Stalin’s voice had held up well and he could still take the baritone’s parts.35 He also sang to his daughter Svetlana and his Alliluev nephews and nieces. Kira Allilueva recalled him dandling her on his knee and giving renditions of his favourite tunes.36 Despite later being imprisoned and exiled by his police, she continued to hold her uncle in affection. His joviality in private surroundings had not vanished with his wife’s suicide.
Another form of recreation was billiards. When the Alliluevs visited, Stalin sometimes played against Nadya’s elder brother Pavel. Usually it was a convivial occasion, but not always. Pavel had grown wary of Joseph. The house rule was that losers in any match had to crawl under the table afterwards. One evening in the 1930s Pavel and Joseph lost a match to Alexander Svanidze and Stanisław Redens. Pavel anticipated dangerous resentment and ordered his sons to do the crawling on behalf of himself and Stalin. But Pavel’s daughter Kira was present. ‘This,’ she cried with childish righteousness, ‘is against the rules. They’ve lost, let them crawl under!’ A frightened Pavel strode across to her and struck her with his cue. Stalin could not be allowed to feel humiliated.37
Indulgence also had to be shown him at his dinner parties. He himself liked to flirt with women and probably he bedded some of them. It would be astounding if such an egotist had failed to take his opportunities with at least some of the many women who made themselves available. But he disapproved of public licentiousness (which is one of the reasons why his sex life after 1932 remains mysterious). His hypocritical prudery about women, though, was accompanied by an open relish for sessions of heavy drinking. He virtually forced brandies and vodka on his guests – and then stood back and waited for them to blurt out some secret while under the influence of alcohol. He himself took the precaution of drinking wine in the same size of glass that the others had for vodka. Another of his tricks was to imbibe a vodka-coloured wine while others drank spirits. (He admitted this stratagem to Ribbentrop in 1939.)38 Having put his guests uncomfortably at their ease, he wanted to watch and listen rather than to get drunk. He liked practical jokes and dirty anecdotes, and there was trouble for anyone who declined to join in. Among his more childish tricks was to put a tomato on the seat of a Politburo member. Always the squelching sound brought tears of laughter to his eyes.
Such parties continued to be held after 1941 even though they happened less frequently. They belonged to the secret life of the Kremlin’s rulers. The only witnesses, apart from the small number of servants, were communist emissaries from eastern Europe who reached Moscow in the closing years of the war. Brought up to imagine Stalin as an austere character, they were always stupefied by the vulgarity of the scene. Stalin must have suspected that this would be the reaction of most people. Although he ordered lots of drink for Churchill and Roosevelt, he never got up to the usual japes in their presence.
He also dressed up for meetings with the Allied leaders. But this was exceptional. With other visitors he saw no need to look smart. He continued to shuffle around the grounds of the Blizhnyaya dacha in his favourite Civil War coat which had fur on both its inside and outside. Alternatively he might put on his ordinary fur coat (which had also been acquired after the October Revolution). When servants surreptitiously tried to get rid of it, he was not fooled: ‘You’re taking the opportunity to bring me a new fur coat every day but this one has another ten years in it.’ He was no less attached to his old boots.39 Zhukov noted that he stuffed his pipe not with any special tobacco but with the filling of the Herzegovina Flor cigarettes available in all kiosks. He unravelled the cigarettes himself.40 One rising young official, Nikolai Baibakov, was taken aback by his shabbiness. His boots were not only decrepit; they even had holes in the toes. Baibakov mentioned this to Stalin’s personal assistant Poskrëbyshev, who told him that Stalin had cut the holes to relieve the friction on his corns.41 Anything to avoid submitting himself to a doctor’s regular inspection!
Although he occasionally let his hair down, Stalin spent most of the war overladen with work. Most nights were passed in his makeshift office deep below the Mayakovski Metro station. The days were long and exhausting, and usually he slept not in a bed but on a divan. Not since Nicholas I, that most austere of Romanovs, had a ruler of the Russians been so frugal in his habits. Stalin was aware of the precedent,42 and turned himself into a human machine for the winning of the Great Patriotic War.