13
You dress so beautifully,” Stalin said admiringly to his sister-in-law Zhenya Alliluyeva. “You should make designing your profession.”
“What! I can’t even sew a button,” retorted the giggling Zhenya. “All my buttons are sewn on by my daughter.”
“So? You should teach Soviet women how to dress!” retorted Stalin.
After Nadya’s death, Zhenya almost moved in to watch over Stalin. In 1934, it seems, this relationship grew into something more. Statuesque and blue-eyed, with wavy blond hair, dimples, an upturned nose and wide, beaming mouth, Zhenya, thirty-six, was a priest’s daughter from Novgorod. She was not beautiful but this “rose of the Novgorod fields,” with golden skin and her quick mischievous nature, radiated health. When she was pregnant with her daughter Kira, she split some logs just before giving birth. While Dora Khazan dressed in austere shifts and Voroshilova got fatter, Zhenya was still young, fresh and completely feminine in her frilly dresses, flamboyant collars and silk scarves.
These women found Stalin all the more appealing because he was so obviously lonely after Nadya’s and now Kirov’s death: “his loneliness is always on one’s mind,” wrote Maria Svanidze. If power itself is the great aphrodisiac, the addition of strength, loneliness and tragedy proved to be a heady cocktail. However, Zhenya was different. She had known Stalin since marrying Nadya’s brother, Pavel, around the time of the Revolution, but they had been abroad a lot and returned from Berlin just before the suicide. Then a fresh relationship developed between Stalin the widower and this funny, blithe woman. The marriage of Pavel and Zhenya had not been easy. Unsuited to military life, Pavel was gentle but hysterical like Nadya. Zhenya grumbled about his weakness. Their marriage had almost ended in the early thirties, when Stalin ordered them to stay together. Despite having given the pistol to Nadya, Pavel often stayed with Stalin.
Stalin admired Zhenya’s joie de vivre. She was unafraid of him: the first time she arrived at Zubalovo after her return from Berlin, she found a meal on the table and ate it all. Stalin then walked in and asked: “Where’s my onion soup?”
Zhenya admitted she had eaten it. This might have provoked an explosion but Stalin merely smiled and said, “Next time, they better make two.”
She said whatever she thought—it was she, among others, who told him about the famine in 1932, yet Stalin forgave her for this. She was well read and Stalin consulted her about what he should read. She suggested an Egyptian history but joked that he “started copying the Pharaohs.” Zhenya made him laugh uproariously with her earthy wit. Their conversation resembled his banter with rough male friends. She was an expert singer of the chastushka, bawdy rhymes with puns that resemble limericks. They do not translate well but Stalin’s favourites were such gems as “Simple to shit off a bridge, but one person did it and fell off” or “Sitting in one’s own shit feels as safe as a fortress.”
Zhenya could not help tactlessly puncturing the balloons of the puffed-up Party women, and Stalin always enjoyed playing off his courtiers. When Polina Molotova, mistress of the perfume industry, boasted to the Leader that she was wearing her latest product, Red Moscow, Stalin sniffed.
“That’s why you smell so nice,” he said.
“Come on, Joseph,” interrupted Zhenya. “She smells of Chanel No. 5!” Afterwards, Zhenya realized she had made a mistake: “Why on earth did I say it?” This made the family enemies among the politicians at a time when politics was about to become a blood sport. Nonetheless she alone could get away with these comments because Stalin “respected her irreverence.”
When Stalin inaugurated the 1936 Constitution, Zhenya, who was late for everything, was late for that too. She crept in and thought no one had noticed until Stalin himself greeted her afterwards.
“How did you spot me?” she asked.
“I see everything, I can see two kilometres away,” replied Stalin whose senses were ferally acute. “You’re the only one who’d dare be late.”
Stalin needed female advice on his children. When Svetlana, maturing early, appeared in her first skirt, Stalin lectured her on “Bolshevik modesty” but asked Zhenya: “Can a girl wear a dress like that? I don’t want her to bare her knees.”
“It’s only natural,” replied Zhenya.
“And she asks for money,” said the father.
“That’s all right, isn’t it?”
“What’s the money for?” he persisted. “A person can live well on ten kopeks!”
“Come on, Joseph!” Zhenya teased him. “That was before the Revolution!”
“I thought you could live on ten kopeks,” murmured Stalin.
“What are they doing? Printing special newspapers for you?” Only Zhenya could say this sort of thing to him.
Stalin and Zhenya probably became lovers at this time. Historians never know what happens behind bedroom doors, and Bolshevik conspiratorial secrecy and prudish morality make these matters especially difficult to research.78 But Maria Svanidze observed their relationship and recorded it in her diary, which Stalin himself preserved: that summer, Maria spotted how Zhenya went out of her way to be alone with Stalin. The following winter, she records how Stalin arrived back in his apartment to find Maria and Zhenya. He “teased Zhenya about getting plump again. He treated her very affectionately. Now that I know everything I have watched them closely . . .”
“Stalin was in love with my mother,” asserts Zhenya’s daughter Kira. Daughters perhaps tend to believe great men are in love with their mothers but her cousin Leonid Redens also believes it was “more than a friendship.” There is other evidence too: later in the thirties, Beria approached Zhenya with an offer that sounds like Stalin’s clumsy proposal of marriage. When she remarried after her husband’s death, Stalin reacted with jealous fury.
Stalin himself was always gently courteous with Zhenya. While he barely telephoned Anna Redens or Maria Svanidze, Svetlana remembered how he often phoned her for a chat, even after their relationship was over.
Zhenya was far from the only attractive woman around Stalin. During the mid-thirties, he was still enjoying a normal social life with an entourage that included a cosmopolitan circle of young and flighty women. But for the moment, it was Zhenya who sat at Stalin’s feet.1
Just after the party, on 28 and 29 December, the assassin Nikolaev and his fourteen co-defendants were tried by Ulrikh in Leningrad. That reptilian hanging judge called Stalin for orders.
“Finish it,” the Vozhd ordered laconically. Following the 1st December Law, they were shot within an hour—and their innocent families soon after. In the month of December, 6,501 people were shot. 2 Stalin had no precise plan for the growing Terror, just the belief that the Party had to be terrorized into submission and that old enemies had to be eradicated. Opportunistic and supersensitive, Stalin meandered towards his goal. The NKVD could not link Leningrad to the “Moscow Centre” of Zinoviev and Kamenev but it had the means to persuade its prisoners to do so. By mid-January, they had indeed encouraged a prisoner to implicate Zinoviev and Kamenev who were sentenced to ten and five years respectively. Stalin distributed a secret letter that warned that all the opposition had to be “treated like White Guards” and “arrested and isolated.” The flood of arrests was so huge that the camps were deluged by “Kirov’s Torrent,” yet, simultaneously, Stalin orchestrated a jazz-playing “thaw”: “Life has become merrier, comrades,” he said. “Life has become better.”379
On 11 January 1935, Stalin and most of the Politburo attended a gala celebration of the Soviet film industry at the Bolshoi which was a sort of “Oscars without the jokes.” The directors were handed Orders of Lenin.
“For us,” Lenin had said, “the most important of all the arts is cinema,” the art form of the new society. Stalin personally controlled a “Soviet Hollywood” through the State Film Board, run by Boris Shumiatsky with whom he had been in exile. Stalin did not merely interfere in movies, he minutely supervised the directors and films down to their scripts: his archive reveals how he even helped write the songs. He talked about films with his entourage and passed every film before it was shown to the public, becoming his own supreme censor. Stalin was Joseph Goebbels combined with Alexander Korda, an unlikely pair united by love of celluloid, rolled into one.4
He was an obsessional movie buff. In 1934, he had already seen the new Cossack “Eastern” Chapaev and The Jolly Fellows so often he knew them by heart. Directed by Grigory Alexandrov, the latter was personally supervised by Stalin. When this director finished The Jolly Fellows,80Shumiatsky decided to tantalize Stalin by showing only the first reel, pretending the second was unfinished. The Vozhd loved it: “Show me the rest!”
Shumiatsky summoned Alexandrov, nervously waiting outside: “You’re wanted at court!”
“It’s a jolly film,” Stalin told Alexandrov. “I felt I’d had a month’s holiday. Take it away from the director. He might spoil it!” he quipped.
Alexandrov immediately started a series of these happy-go-lucky light musical comedies: Circus was followed by Stalin’s all-time favourite, Volga, Volga. When the director came to make the last in the series, he called it Cinderella but Stalin wrote out a list of twelve possible titles includingShining Path which Alexandrov accepted. Stalin actually worked on the lyrics of the songs too: there is an intriguing note in his archive dated July 1935 in which he writes out the words for one of the songs in pencil, changing and crossing out to get the lyric to scan:
A joyful song is easy for the heart;
It doesn’t bore you ever;
And all the villages small and big adore the song;
Big towns love the tune.
Beneath it, he scrawls the words: “To spring. Spirit. Mikoyan” and then “Thank you comrades.”5
When the director Alexander Dovzhenko appealed for Stalin’s help with his movie Aerograd, he was summoned to the Little Corner within a day and asked to read his entire script to Voroshilov and Molotov. Later Stalin suggested his next movie, adding that “neither my words nor newspaper articles put you under any obligation. You’re a free man . . . If you have other plans, do something else. Don’t be embarrassed. I summoned you so you should know this.” He advised the director to use “Russian folk songs—wonderful songs” which he liked to play on his gramophone.
“Did you ever hear them?” asked Stalin.
No, replied the director, who had no phonograph.
“An hour after the conversation, they brought the gramophone to my house, a present from our leader that,” concluded Dovzhenko, “I will treasure to the end of my life.”6
Meanwhile, the magnates discussed how to manage Sergei Eisenstein, thirty-six, the Latvian-German-Jewish avant-garde director of Battleship Potemkin. He had lingered too long in Hollywood and, as Stalin informed the American novelist Upton Sinclair, “lost the trust of his friends in the USSR.” Stalin told Kaganovich he was a “Trotskyite if not worse.”
Eisenstein was lured back and put to work on Bezhin Meadow, inspired by the story of Pavlik Morozov, the boy-hero who denounced his own father for kulakism. The tawdry project did not turn out as Stalin hoped. Kaganovich loudly denounced his colleagues’ trust: “We can’t trust Eisenstein. He’ll again waste millions and give us nothing . . . because he’s against Socialism. Eisenstein was saved by Vyacheslav [Molotov] and Andrei Zhdanov who were willing to give the director another chance.” But Stalin knew he was “very talented.” As tensions rose with Germany, he commissioned Eisenstein to make a film about that vanquisher of foreign invaders, Alexander Nevsky, promoting his new paradigm of socialism and nationalism. Stalin was delighted with it.
When Stalin wrote a long memorandum to the director Friedrich Emmler about his film The Great Citizen, his third point read: “The reference to Stalin must be excluded. Instead of Stalin, mention the Central Committee.”7
Stalin’s modesty was in its way as ostentatious as the excesses of his personal cult. The leaders themselves had promoted Stalin’s cult that was the triumph of his inferiority complex. Mikoyan and Khrushchev blamed Kaganovich for encouraging Stalin’s concealed vanity and inventing “Stalinism”:
“Let’s replace Long Live Leninism with Long Live Stalinism!” Stalin criticized Kaganovich but he knew Stalin better and he continued to promote “Stalinism.”
“Why do you eulogize me as if a single person decides everything!” asked Stalin. Meanwhile he personally supervised the cult that was flourishing in the newspapers: in Pravda, Stalin was mentioned in half the editorials between 1933 and 1939. He was always given flowers and photographed with children. Articles appeared: “How I got acquainted with Comrade Stalin.” The planes that flew over Red Square formed the word “Stalin” in the skies. Pravda declared: “Stalin’s life is our life, our beautiful present and future.” When he appeared at the Seventh Congress of Soviets, two thousand delegates screamed and cheered. A writer described the reaction as “love, devotion, selflessness.” A female worker whispered: “How simple he is, how modest!”
There were similar cults for the others: Kaganovich was celebrated as “Iron Lazar” and the “Iron Commissar” and in thousands of pictures at parades. Voroshilov was honoured in the “Voroshilov Rations” for the army and the “Voroshilov Marksman’s Prize” and his birthday celebrations were so grandiose that Stalin gave one of his most famous speeches at them. Schoolchildren traded picture postcards of these heroes like football players, the dashing Voroshilov trading at a much higher price than the dour Molotov.8
Stalin’s modesty was not completely assumed: in his many battles between vainglory and humility, he simultaneously encouraged eulogy and despised it. When the Museum of the Revolution asked if they could display the original manuscripts of his works, he wrote back: “I didn’t think in your old age, you’d be such a fool. If the book is published in millions, why do you need the manuscript? I burned all the manuscripts!” 9 When the publishers of a Georgian memoir of his childhood sent a note to Poskrebyshev asking permission, Stalin banned Zhdanov from publishing it, complaining that it was “tactless and foolish” and demanding that the culprits “be punished.” But this was partly to keep control of the presentation of his early life.10
He was aware of the absurdities of the cult, intelligent enough to know that the worship of slaves was surely worthless. A student at a technical college was threatened with jail for throwing a paper dart that struck Stalin’s portrait. The student appealed to Stalin who backed him: “They’ve wronged you,” he wrote. “I ask . . . do not punish him!” Then he joked: “The good marksman who hits the target should be praised!” 11
Yet Stalin needed the cult and secretly fostered it. With his trusted chef de cabinet, he could be honest. Two notes buried in Poskrebyshev’s files are especially revealing: when a collective farm asked the right to name itself after Stalin, he gave Poskrebyshev blanket authority to name anything after himself: “I’m not opposed to their wish to ‘be granted the name of Stalin’ or to the others . . . I’m giving you the right to answer such proposals with agreement [underlined] in my name.”12 One admirer wrote to say, “I’ve decided to change my name to Lenin’s best pupil, Stalin” and asked the titan’s permission.
“I’m not opposed,” replied Stalin. “I even agree. I’d be happy because this circumstance would give me the chance to have a younger brother. (I have no brother.) Stalin.”13 Just after the film prize–giving, death again touched the Politburo.