PART TWO
8
Nadya died instantly. Hours later, Stalin stood in the dining room absorbing the news. He asked his sister-in-law Zhenya Alliluyeva “what was missing in him.” The family were shocked when he threatened suicide, something they “had never heard before.” He grieved in his room for days: Zhenya and Pavel decided to stay with him to make sure he did not harm himself. He could not understand why it had happened, raging what did it mean? Why had such a terrible stab in the back been dealt to him of all people? “He was too intelligent not to know that people always commit suicide in order to punish someone . . .” wrote his daughter Svetlana, so he kept asking whether it was true he had been inconsiderate, hadn’t he loved her? “I was a bad husband,” he confessed to Molotov. “I had no time to take her to the cinema.” He told Vlasik, “She’s completely overturned my life!” He stared sadly at Pavel, growling, “That was a hell of a nice present you gave her! A pistol!”
Around 1 p.m., Professor Kushner and a colleague examined the body of Nadezhda Stalin in her little bedroom. “The position of the body,” the professor scrawled on a piece of squared paper ripped from one of the children’s exercise books, “was that her head is on the pillow turned to the right side. Near the pillow on the bed is a little gun.” The housekeeper must have replaced the gun on the bed. “The face is absolutely tranquil, the eyes semi-closed, semi-open. On the right part of face and neck, there are blue and red marks and blood . . .” There were bruises on her face: did Stalin really have something to hide? Had he returned to the apartment, quarrelled with her, hit her and then shot her? Given his murderous pedigree, one more death is not impossible. Yet the bruise could have been caused by falling off the bed. No one with any knowledge of that night has ever suggested that Stalin killed her. But he was certainly aware that his enemies would whisper that he had.
“There is a five-millimetre hole over the heart—an open hole,” noted the Professor. “Conclusion—death was immediate from an open wound to the heart.” This scrap of paper, which one can now see in the State Archive, was not to be seen again for six decades.
Molotov, Kaganovich and Sergo came and went, deciding what to do: as usual in such moments, the Bolshevik instinct was to lie and cover up, even though in this case if they had been more open, they might have avoided the most damaging slanders. It was clear enough that Nadya had committed suicide but Molotov, Kaganovich and her godfather Yenukidze got Stalin’s agreement that this self-destruction could not be announced publicly. It would be taken as a political protest. They would announce she had died of appendicitis. The doctors, a profession whose Hippocratic oath was to be as undermined by the Bolsheviks as by the Nazis, signed the lie. Servants were informed that Stalin had been at his dacha with Molotov and Kalinin—but unsurprisingly, they gossiped dangerously.
Yenukidze drafted the announcement of her death and then wrote a letter of condolence, to be published next day in Pravda, signed by all the leaders’ wives and then the leaders themselves, starting with Nadya’s four greatest friends—Ekaterina Voroshilova, Polina Molotova, Dora Khazan and Maria Kaganovich: “Our close friend, a person with a wonderful soul . . . young, vigorous and devoted to the Bolshevik Party and the Revolution.” Even this death was seen by these singular dogmatists in terms of Bolshevism. 1
Since Stalin was barely functioning, Yenukidze and the magnates debated how to arrange this unique funeral. The Bolshevik funeral ritual combined elements of Tsarist funeral tradition with its own idiosyncratic culture. The deceased were beautified by the finest morticians, usually the professors in charge of Lenin’s cadaver, then lay in state, snowy faces often heavily rouged, among the surreal mise-en-scène of lush tropical palms, bouquets, red banners, all unnaturally illuminated with arc lights. The Politburo bore the open coffin to, and from, the Hall of Columns where they also stood guard like knights of old. The rigorous eminence was then cremated and a plangent military funeral was held, with the Politburo again bearing an elaborate catafalque enclosing the urn of ashes which they placed in the Kremlin Wall. But Stalin himself must have demanded an old-fashioned funeral.
Yenukidze presided over the Funeral Commission with Dora Khazan, Andreyev’s wife, and Pauker, the Chekist who was so close to Stalin. They met first thing next morning and decided on the procession, the place of burial, the guard of honour. Pauker, the theatrical expert—ex-coiffeur of the Budapest Opera—was in charge of the orchestras: there were to be two, a military one and a theatrical one of fifty instruments.2
Stalin could not speak himself. He asked Kaganovich, the Politburo’s best speaker, to give the oration. Even that energetic bulldozer of a man, fresh from shooting droves of innocent Kuban Cossacks, was daunted by the burden of giving such a speech in front of Stalin himself, but as with so many other macabre chores, “Stalin asked and I did it.” 3
The death of Nadya from appendicitis was broken to the children out at Zubalovo: Artyom was distraught but Vasily never recovered. Svetlana, six, did not grasp this finality. Voroshilov, who was so kind in all matters outside politics, visited her but could not talk for weeping. The older children were driven to Moscow. Svetlana remained in the country until the funeral.
When the body was removed from the apartment, some time on the morning of the 10th, a little girl in the Horse Guards, opposite Stalin’s Poteshny Palace, sat glued to the window of her apartment. Natalya Andreyeva, daughter of Andreyev and Dora Khazan who was managing the funeral with Yenukidze, watched as a group of men carried down the coffin. Stalin walked beside it, wearing no gloves in the freezing cold, clutching at the side of the coffin with tears running down his cheeks.4 The body must have been taken to the Kremlevka to cover up the bruises.
The schoolboys, Vasily Stalin and Artyom, arrived at Stalin’s flat where Pavel, Zhenya and Nadya’s sister Anna, took turns watching over the widower who remained in his room and would not come out for dinner. The gloomy apartment was pervaded by whispers: Artyom’s mother arrived and foolishly told her son the spellbinding truth about the suicide. Artyom rashly asked the housekeeper about it. Both he and his mother were reprimanded. “The things I saw in that house!” recalls Artyom.
During the night, the body was delivered to the Hall of Columns close to Red Square and the Kremlin. It was to be the scene of some of the great dramas and lying-in-states of Stalin’s rule. At eight the next morning, Yagoda joined the Funeral Commission.
The three smaller children were taken to the hall where Nadezhda Alliluyeva Stalin lay in an open casket, her round face surrounded by bouquets, her bruises exquisitely powdered and rouged away by Moscow’s macabre maestros. “She was very beautiful in her coffin, very young, her face clear and lovely,” recalls her niece Kira Alliluyeva. Zina Ordzhonikidze, the plump half-Yakut wife of the irrepressible Sergo, took Svetlana’s hand and led her up to the coffin. She cried and they rushed her out. Yenukidze comforted her, despatching her back to Zubalovo. She only learned of the suicide a decade later, incongruously from the Illustrated London News.
Stalin arrived accompanied by the Politburo, who stood guard around the catafalque, a duty to which they were to grow accustomed in the deadly years ahead. Stalin was weeping. Vasily left Artyom and ran forward towards Stalin and “hung on to his father, saying, ‘Papa don’t cry!’ ” To a chorus of sobs from Nadya’s family and the hardmen of the Politburo and Cheka, the Vozhd approached the coffin with Vasily holding on to him. Stalin looked down at this woman who had loved, hated, punished and rejected him. “I’d never seen Stalin cry before,” said Molotov, “but as he stood there beside the coffin, the tears ran down his cheeks.”
“She left me like an enemy,” Stalin said bitterly but then Molotov heard him say: “I didn’t save you.” They were about to nail down the coffin when Stalin suddenly stopped them. To everyone’s surprise, he leaned down, lifted Nadya’s head and began to kiss her ardently. This provoked more weeping.
The coffin was carried out into Red Square where it was laid on a black funeral carriage with four little onion domes on each corner holding an intricate canopy, a cortège that seemed to belong in Tsarist times. There was an honour guard marching around it and the streets were lined with soldiers. Six grooms in black led six horses and ahead, a military brass band played the funeral march. Bukharin, who was close to Nadya but had tainted her politically, offered his condolences to Stalin. The widower insisted strangely that he had gone to the dacha after the banquet; he was not in the apartment. The death was nothing to do with him. So Stalin propagated an alibi.
The procession set off through the streets, the public held far back by police. Here was the first of many funerals in which the cause of death was concealed from most of the mourners. Stalin walked between Molotov and the shrewd, hawk-eyed Armenian Mikoyan, themselves flanked by Kaganovich and Voroshilov. Pauker, resplendent in his uniform, belly buttressed by his invisible corset, kept pace to the side. Vasily and Artyom walked behind them along with the family, the cream of the Bolshevik movement and delegates from Nadya’s Academy.
Her mother Olga blamed Nadya: “How could you do this?” she addressed her absent daughter. “How could you leave the children?” Most of the family and leaders agreed, and sympathized with Stalin.
“Nadya was wrong,” declared the forthright Polina. “She left him at such a difficult time.”
Artyom and Vasily fell behind the band and lost sight of Stalin. It has variously been claimed that Stalin either did not go to the funeral or that he walked all the way to the Novodevichy Cemetery. Neither is true. Yagoda insisted that it was not safe for Stalin to walk the whole route. When the procession reached Manege Square, Stalin, along with the deceased’s mother, were driven to the cemetery.
At Novodevichy, Stalin stood on one side of the grave, and the two boys, Vasily and Artyom, watched him from the other. Bukharin spoke, then Yenukidze announced the main speaker: “It was so difficult,” Kaganovich remembered, “with Stalin there.” The Iron Commissar, more used to tub-thumping broadsides, delivered his oration in that special Bolshevik language: “Comrades, we are at the funeral of one of our best members of our Party. She grew up in the family of a Bolshevik worker . . . organically connected with our Party . . . she was the devoted friend of those who ruled . . . fighting the great struggle. She distinguished herself by the best features of a Bolshevik—firmness, toughness in the struggle . . .” Then he turned to the Vozhd: “We’re close friends and comrades of Comrade Stalin. We understand the weight of Comrade Stalin’s loss ... We understand we must share the burdens of Comrade Stalin’s loss.”
Stalin picked up a handful of soil and threw it onto the coffin. Artyom and Vasily were asked to do the same. Artyom asked why it was necessary. “So she can have some earth from your hand,” he was told. Later Stalin chose the monument that rested over her grave, with a rose to remember the one she wore in her hair and proudly emblazoned with the sacred words: “Member of the Bolshevik Party.” For the rest of his life, Stalin ruminated on her death. “Oh Nadya, Nadya, what did you do?” he mused in his old age, excusing himself: “There was always so much pressure on me.” The suicide of a spouse usually affects the surviving partner, often leaving the bitter taste of guilt, betrayal and, above all, desertion. Nadya’s abandonment of Stalin wounded and humiliated him, breaking one more of his meagre ties to human sympathy, redoubling his brutality, jealousy, coldness and self-pity. But the political challenges of 1932, particularly what Stalin regarded as betrayals by some of his comrades, also played their part.
“After 1932,” Kaganovich observed, “Stalin changed.” 5
The family watched over Stalin, letting themselves into the apartment in case he needed anything. One night, Zhenya Alliluyeva visited him but there was no sound. Then she heard an ugly screeching and found the Vozhd lying on a sofa in the half-light, spitting on the wall. She knew he had been there a very long time because the wall was dripping with glistening trails of spit.
“What on earth are you doing, Joseph?” she asked him. “You can’t stay like that.” He said nothing, staring at the saliva rolling down the wall.6
At the time, Maria Svanidze, the wife of Alyosha, his former brother-in-law, who now began to keep a remarkable diary,52 thought Nadya’s death had made him “less of a marble hero.”
In his despair, he repeated two questions: “Never mind the children, they forgot her in a few days, but how could she do this to me?” Sometimes he saw it the other way round, asking Budyonny: “I understand how she could do this to me, but what about the children?” Always the conversation ended thus: “She broke my life. She crippled me.” This was a humiliating personal failure that undermined his confidence. Stalin, wrote Svetlana, “wanted to resign but the Politburo said, ‘No, no, you have to stay!’ ”
He swiftly recovered the Messianic confidence in his mission: the war against the peasants and his enemies within the Party. His mind strayed onto the newly arrested Eismont, Smirnov and Riutin whose “Platform” had been found in his wife’s room. He was drinking a lot, suffering insomnia. A month after her death, on 17 December, he scrawled a strange note to Voroshilov: “The cases of Eismont, Smirnov and Riutin are full of alcohol. We see an opposition steeped in vodka. Eismont, Rykov. Hunting wild animals. Tomsky, repeat Tomsky. Roaring wild animals that growl. Smirnov and other Moscow rumours. Like a desert. I feel terrible, not sleeping much.” This letter shows how disturbed Stalin was after Nadya’s death. It reeks of drink and despair.
He did not soften towards the peasants. On 28 December, Postyshev sent Stalin a note about placing GPU guards on grain elevators because so much bread was being stolen by starving people. Then he added, “There’ve been strong elements of sabotage of bread supplies in the collective Machine Tractor Stations . . . Let me send 2–300 kulaks from Dneipropetrovsk to the North by order of the GPU.”
“Right! Pravilno!” agreed Stalin enthusiastically in his blue pencil.
Nadya hung over Stalin until his own death. Whenever he encountered anyone who knew Nadya well, he talked about her. Two years later, when he met Bukharin at the theatre, he missed a whole act, talking about Nadya, how he could not live without her. He often discussed her with Budyonny.53 The family met every 8th of November to remember her but he hated these anniversaries, remaining in the south—yet he always kept photographs of her, larger and larger ones, round his houses. He claimed he gave up dancing when Nadya died.
Thousands of letters of condolence poured into Stalin’s apparat so the few he chose to keep are interesting: “She was fragile as a flower,” read one. Perhaps he preserved it because it finished about him: “Remember, we need you so take care of yourself.” Then he kept a poem sent to him, dedicated to her, that again appealed to his vision of self:
Night ocean, Wild storm . . .
A haunted silhouette on the bridge of the ship.
It’s the captain. Who is he?
A man of blood and flesh.
Or is he iron and steel?
When students wanted to name their institute after her, he did not agree but simply sent the request to Nadya’s sister, Anna: “After reading this note, leave it on my desk!” The pain of the subject was still fresh sixteen years later when a sculptor wrote to say that he wanted to give Stalin a bust of Nadya. Stalin wrote laconically to Poskrebyshev, his chef de cabinet: “ Tell him that you received the letter and you’re returning it. Stalin.”
There was no time for mourning. The Party was at war.
At 4 p.m. on 12 November, the day after the funeral, Stalin arrived at his office to meet Kaganovich, Voroshilov, Molotov and Sergo. Alongside them was Stalin’s closest friend, Sergei Mironovich Kirov, First Secretary of Leningrad and Politburo member. “After Nadya’s tragic death,” Maria Svanidze noticed that “Kirov was the closest person who managed to approach Joseph intimately and simply, to give him that missing warmth and cosiness.” Stalin turned to Kirov who, he said, “cared for me like a child.”7
Always singing operatic arias loudly, brimming with good cheer and boyish enthusiasm, Kirov was one of those uncomplicated men who win friends easily. Small, handsome with deep-set brown, slightly Tartar eyes, pock-marked, brown-haired and high-cheekboned, women and men seemed to like him equally. Married without children, he was said to be a womanizer with a special eye on the ballerinas of the Mariinsky Ballet which he controlled in Leningrad.54 Certainly he followed ballet and opera closely, listening to it in his own apartment by a special link. A workaholic like his comrades, Kirov liked the outdoors, camping and hunting, with his boon companion Sergo. Like Andreyev, Kirov was an avid mountaineer, an appropriate hobby for a Bolshevik. He was at ease in his own skin. It was perhaps this that made him so attractive to Stalin whose friendships resembled crushes—and, like crushes, they could turn swiftly into bitter envy. Now he wanted to be with Kirov all the time: Kirov was in and out of his office five times during the days after Nadya’s funeral.
Born Sergei Kostrikov in 1886, the son of a feckless clerk who left him an orphan, in Urzhum, five hundred miles north-east of Moscow, Kirov was sent by charity to the Kazan Industrial School where he excelled. But the 1905 Revolution interfered with his plans for university, and he joined the Social Democrat Party, becoming a professional revolutionary. In between exiles, he married the daughter of a Jewish watchmaker but like all good Bolsheviks, his personal life “was subordinated to the revolutionary cause,” according to his wife. During the doldrums before the war, Kirov had worked as a journalist in the bourgeois press, which was strictly banned by the Party, and this was a black mark on his Bolshevik pedigree. Nineteen seventeen found him setting up power in the Terek in the North Caucasus. During the Civil War, Kirov was one of the swashbuckling commissars in the North Caucasus beside Sergo and Mikoyan. In Astrakhan he enforced Bolshevik power in March 1919 with liberal blood-letting: over four thousand were killed. When a bourgeois was caught hiding his own furniture, Kirov ordered him shot. He and Sergo, whose lives and deaths were parallel, engineered the seizure of Georgia in 1921, remaining in Baku afterwards, both brutal Bolsheviks of the Civil War generation.
He had probably met Stalin in 1917 but got to know his patron on holiday in 1925: “Dear Koba, I’m in Kislovodsk . . . I’m getting better. In a week, I’ll come to you . . . Greetings to everyone. Say hello to Nadya,” he wrote. Kirov was a family favourite. Stalin inscribed a copy of his book On Lenin and Leninism: “To SM Kirov, my friend and beloved brother.” In 1926, Stalin removed Zinoviev from his Leningrad power base and promoted Kirov to take over Peter the Great’s capital, now the second largest Party in the State. He joined the Politburo in 1930.8
When Kirov asked if he could fly south to join him for the 1931 holidays, Stalin replied: “I have no right and would not advise anyone to authorize flights. I most humbly request you to come by train.” Artyom, often on these holidays, recalls, “Stalin was so fond of Kirov, he’d personally meet Kirov’s train in Sochi.” Stalin always had “a lovely time with Kirov,” even swimming and visiting the banya. Sometimes when Kirov swam, “Stalin went to the beach and sat waiting for Kirov,” says Artyom.
After Nadya’s death, Stalin’s friendship with “my Kirich” became more insistent. Stalin often called him in Leningrad at any time of the night: the vertushka phone can still be seen by Kirov’s bed in his apartment. When he came to Moscow, Kirov preferred to stay with Sergo, who was so fond of his boon companion that his widow remembered how he once faked a car crash to ensure that Kirov missed his train.55 Yet Stalin and Kirov were “like a pair of equal brothers, teasing one another, telling dirty stories, laughing,” says Artyom. “Big friends, brothers and they needed one another.”9
This did not mean that Stalin completely trusted Kirov. In the autumn of 1929, Stalin orchestrated Pravda’s criticism of Kirov.10 However fond he was of Kirov, Stalin could also be cross with him. In June 1928, one of his articles seemed to have been edited when it appeared in Leningradskaya Pravda, provoking a letter that revealed Stalin’s thin-skinned paranoia on even small matters: “I understand . . . the technical reasons . . . Yet I’ve heard no other such examples of articles by Politburo members . . . It seems strange that the 40–50 words cut are the brightest about how the peasantry are a capitalist class . . . I await your explanation.” 11
Kirov did not regard Stalin as a saint: during the 1929 birthday celebrations that raised Stalin to Vozhd, the Leningraders dared to mention Lenin’s views on Stalin’s rudeness.12 Kirov knew Stalin’s unusual mentality well: when a student sent him some questions on ideology, he forwarded them to Kirov with this note: “Kirov! You must read the letter of student Fedotov . . . an absolutely politically illiterate young man. Maybe you will telephone him and talk to him, probably he is a corrupted drunken “Party member.” We must not introduce the GPU I think. By the way, the student is a very good trickster with an anti-Soviet face which he conceals artistically beneath a simple face that says ‘Help me understand. Maybe you understand all—I don’t.’ Greetings! Stalin.” 13 No doubt Kirov’s intimacy with Sergo, Kuibyshev and Mikoyan worried Stalin. The challenges of 1932—the Riutin Platform, Kirov’s possible resistance to Riutin’s execution, the famine, the suicide of Nadezhda—had shown Stalin needed firmer loyalty.
After Nadya’s death, Kirov was almost part of the family: Stalin insisted he stay with him, not Sergo. Kirov stayed at Stalin’s apartment so often he knew where the sheets and pillows were and he would bed down on the sofa. The children loved Kirov and sometimes when he was there, Svetlana would put on a doll show for him. Her favourite game was her own mock government. Her father was “First Secretary.” This Stalinette wrote orders like: “To my First Secretary, I order you to allow me to go with you to the theatre.” She signed it “The Mistress [or Boss— khozyaika] Setanka.” She hung the notes in the dining room above the telephone table. Stalin replied: “I obey.” Kaganovich, Molotov and Sergo were Setanka’s Second Secretaries, but “she has a special friendship with Kirov,” noticed Maria Svanidze, “because Joseph is so good and close with him.”14
Stalin returned to the ascetic Bedouin life of the underground Bolshevik, with the tension and variety of the revolutionary on the run, except that now his restless progress more resembled the train of a Mongol Khan. Though a creature of routine, he needed perpetual movement: there were beds in his houses but there were also big, hard divans in every room. “I never sleep on a bed,” he told a visitor. “Always a divan,” and on whichever one he happened to be reading. “Which historical person had the same Spartan habit?” he asked, answering with that autodidactic omniscience: “Nicholas I.” Nadya’s death naturally changed the way Stalin and his children lived.15