2
Oh what a wonderful time it was,” wrote Voroshilov’s wife in her diary. “What simple, nice, friendly relationships.”1 The intimate collegiate life of the leaders up until the mid-thirties could not have been further from the cliché of Stalin’s dreary, terrifying world. In the Kremlin, they were always in and out of each other’s houses. Parents and children saw each other constantly. The Kremlin was a village of unparalleled intimacy. Bred by decades of fondness (and of course resentments), friendships deepened or frayed, enmities seethed. Stalin often dropped in on his neighbours the Kaganoviches for a chess game. Natasha Andreyeva remembers Stalin frequently putting his head round their door looking for her parents: “Is Andrei here or Dora Moisevna?” Sometimes he wanted to go to the cinema but her parents were late, so she went with Stalin herself. When Mikoyan needed something, he would simply cross the courtyard and knock on Stalin’s door, where he would be invited in for dinner. If he was not at home, they pushed a note under the door. “Your leaving’s most unfortunate,” wrote Voroshilov. “I called on your apartment and no one answered.” 2
When Stalin was on holiday, this merry band continually dropped in on Nadya to send her husband messages and catch up on the latest political gossip: “Yesterday Mikoyan called in and asked after your health and said he’ll visit you in Sochi,” Nadya wrote to Stalin in September 1929. “Today Voroshilov is back from Nalchik and he called me . . .” Voroshilov in turn gave her news of Sergo. A few days later, Sergo visited her with Voroshilov. Next she talked to Kaganovich who sent his regards to Stalin. Some families were more private than others: while the Mikoyans were highly sociable, the Molotovs, on the same floor as them, were more reserved and blocked up the door between their apartments. 3 If Stalin was the undoubted headmaster of this chatty, bickering school, then Molotov was its prissy prefect.
The only man to shake hands with Lenin, Hitler, Himmler, Göring, Roosevelt and Churchill, Molotov was Stalin’s closest ally. Nicknamed “Stone-Arse” for his indefatigable work rate, Molotov liked to correct people ponderously and tell them that Lenin himself had actually given him the soubriquet “Iron-Arse.” Small, stocky with a bulging forehead, chilling hazel eyes blinking behind round spectacles, and a stammer when angry (or talking to Stalin), Molotov, thirty-nine, looked like a bourgeois student, which he had indeed been. Even among a Politburo of believers, he was a stickler for Bolshevik theory and severity: the Robespierre of Stalin’s court. Yet he also possessed an instinct for the possible in power politics: “I am a man of the Nineteenth Century,” said Molotov.
Born in Kukarla, a provincial backwater near Perm (soon renamed Molotov), Vyacheslav Scriabin was the son of a boozy salesman, a poor nobleman but no relation to the composer. He had played the violin for merchants in his home town and, unusually for Stalin’s men, had a glancing secondary education though he became a revolutionary at sixteen. Molotov regarded himself as a journalist—he first met Stalin when they both worked on Pravda . He was cruel and vengeful, actually recommending death for those, even women, who crossed him. Harsh to his subordinates, with whom he constantly lost his temper, he was so disciplined that he would declare to his office that he would take “a thirteen-minute nap,” then wake up on the thirteenth minute. Unlike many of the Politburo’s energetic showmen, Molotov was an uninspired “plodder.”
A candidate Politburo member since 1921, “our Vecha” had been Party Secretary before Stalin but Lenin denounced Molotov for the “most shameful bureaucratism, and the most stupid.” When Trotsky attacked him, he revealed the intellectual inferiority complex he shared with Stalin and Voroshilov: “We can’t all be geniuses, Comrade Trotsky,” he replied. The chips on the shoulders of these home-grown Bolsheviks were mountainous.
Now Second Secretary after Stalin himself, Molotov admired Koba but did not worship him. He often disagreed with, and criticized, Stalin right up until the end. He could outdrink anyone in the leadership— no mean feat among so many alcoholics. He seemed to enjoy Stalin’s teasing, even when he called him the Jewish “Molotstein.”
His saving grace was his devotion to Polina Karpovskaya, his Jewish wife, known by her nom de guerre Zhemchuzhina, “the Pearl.” Never beautiful but bold and intelligent, Polina dominated Molotov, worshipped Stalin and became a leader in her own right. Both devoted Bolsheviks, they had fallen in love at a women’s conference in 1921. Molotov thought her “clever, beautiful and above all a great Bolshevik.”
She was the consolation for the discipline, stress and severity of his crusade, yet Molotov was no automaton. His love letters show how he idolized her like a schoolboy in love. “Polinka, darling, my love! I shan’t hide that sometimes I’m overcome with impatience and desire for your closeness and caresses. I kiss you, my beloved, desired . . . Your loving Vecha. I’m tied to you body and soul . . .” Sometimes the letters were wildly passionate: “I wait to kiss you impatiently and kiss you everywhere, adored, sweetie, my love.” She was his “bright love, my heart and happiness, my pleasure honey, Polinka.”4
Molotov’s spoiled daughter, Svetlana, and the other Politburo children played in the courtyard but “we didn’t want to live in the Kremlin. We were constantly told by our parents not to be noisy. ‘You’re not in the street now,’ they’d say. ‘You’re in the Kremlin.’ It was like a jail and we had to show passes and get passes for our friends to visit us,” remembers Natasha, the daughter of Andreyev and Dora Khazan. The children constantly bumped into Stalin: “When I was ten with long plaits playing hop, skip and jump with Rudolf Menzhinsky [son of the OGPU chief ], I was suddenly lifted up by strong hands and I wriggled round and saw Stalin’s face with its brown eyes and very intense, strict expression. ‘So who are you?’ he asked. I said ‘Andreyeva.’ ‘Well, go on jumping then!’ Afterwards, Stalin frequently chatted to her, particularly since the Kremlin’s earliest cinema was reached by a staircase near their front door.
Often Stalin’s dinner was simply a continuation of his meetings with workaholic comrades: soup was placed on the sideboard, guests could help themselves and they frequently worked until 3 a.m., recalls Stalin’s adopted son Artyom. “I saw Molotov, Mikoyan and Kaganovich all the time.” Stalin and Nadya often dined with the other Kremlin couples. “Dinners were simple,” wrote Mikoyan in his memoirs. “Two courses, a few starters, sometimes some herring . . . Soup for first course then meat or fish and fruit for dessert—it was like anywhere else then.” There was a bottle of white wine and little drinking. No one sat at table for more than half an hour. One evening, Stalin who took a serious interest in political image, emulated Peter the Great’s barbering exploits: “Get rid of that beard!” he ordered Kaganovich, asking Nadya, “Can I have some scissors? I’ll do it myself.”14 Kaganovich did it there and then. Such was the entertainment at Stalin and Nadya’s for dinner.
The wives were influential. Stalin listened to Nadya: she had met a big-eared rotund young hobbledehoy, a fitter on the mines of the Donets, Khrushchev, at the Academy where he was energetically crushing the opposition. She recommended him to Stalin who launched his career. Stalin regularly had the young official to dinner with Nadya. Stalin always liked Khrushchev, partly because of Nadya’s recommendation. This was, remembered Khrushchev, “how I survived . . . my lottery ticket.” He simply could not believe that here was Stalin, the demigod he worshipped, “laughing and joking” with him so modestly.
Nadya fearlessly approached Stalin about injustices: when an official, probably a Rightist, was sacked from his job, she pleaded for his career and told Stalin that “these methods should not be used with such workers . . . it’s so sad . . . He looked as if he’d been killed. I know you really hate me interfering but I think you should interfere in this case which everyone knows is unfair.” Stalin unexpectedly agreed to help and she was thrilled: “I’m so glad you trust me . . . it’s a shame not to correct a mistake.” Stalin did not take such interference kindly from anyone else but he seemed to be able to take it from his young wife.
Polina Molotova was so ambitious that when she decided her boss as Commissar for Light Industry was not up to the job, she asked Stalin during dinner if she could create a Soviet perfume industry. Stalin called in Mikoyan and placed her TeZhe perfume trust under him. She became the Tsarina of Soviet fragrance. Mikoyan admired her as “capable, clever, and vigorous” but “haughty.”5
Except for the snobbish Molotovs, these potentates still lived simply in the palaces of the Kremlin, inspired by their devout revolutionary mission with its obligatory “Bolshevik modesty.” Corruption and extravagance were not yet widespread: indeed, the Politburo wives could barely afford to dress their children and the new archives show that Stalin himself sometimes ran out of money.
Nadya Stalin and Dora Khazan, the ascendant Andreyev’s wife, daily caught the tram to the Academy. Nadya is always held up as a paragon of modesty for using her maiden name but Dora did the same: it was the style of the times. Sergo banned his daughter taking his limousine to school: “too bourgeois!” The Molotovs on the other hand were already notoriously unproletarian: Natalya Rykova heard her father complain that the Molotovs never invited their bodyguards to eat at table with them.
At Stalin’s, Nadya was in charge: Svetlana says that her mother managed the household on “a modest budget.” They prided themselves on their Bolshevik austerity. Nadya regularly exhausted her housekeeping money: “Please send me 50 roubles because I only get my money on 15 October and I’ve got none.”
“Tatka, I forgot to send the money,” replied Stalin. “But I’ve now sent it (120 roubles) with colleagues leaving today . . . Kiss you, Joseph.” Then he checked she had received it. She replied: “I got the letter with the money. Thanks! Glad you’re coming back! Write when you’re arriving so I can meet you!”6
On 3 January 1928, Stalin wrote to Khalatov, the chief of GIZ (the State Publishing House): “I’m in great need of money. Would you send me 200 roubles!”15 Stalin cultivated his puritanism out of both conviction and taste: when he found new furniture in his apartment, he reacted viciously: “It seems someone from housekeeping or the GPU bought some furniture . . . contrary to my order that old furniture is fine,” he wrote. “Discover and punish the guilty! I ask you to remove the furniture and put it in storage!”15
The Mikoyans had so many children—five boys plus some adopted children and, in the summer, the extended Armenian family arrived for three months—that they were short of money even though Mikoyan himself was one of the top half-dozen men in Russia. So Ashken Mikoyan secretly borrowed money from the other Politburo wives who had fewer children. Mikoyan would have been furious if he had known about it, according to his sons. When Polina Molotova saw the shabby Mikoyan children, she reprimanded their mother, who retorted: “I have five boys and I haven’t got the money.”
“But,” snapped Polina, “you’re the wife of a Politburo member!”7