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On 26 October 1932, a chosen élite of fifty writers were mysteriously invited to the art deco mansion of Russia’s greatest living novelist, Maxim Gorky.46 The tall, haggard writer with the grizzled moustache, now sixty-four, met the guests on the stairway. The dining room was filled with tables covered in smart white cloths. They waited in excited anticipation. Then Stalin arrived with Molotov, Voroshilov and Kaganovich. The Party took literature so seriously that the magnates personally edited the work of prominent writers. After some small talk, Stalin and his comrades sat down at the end table near Gorky himself. Stalin stopped smiling and started to talk about the creation of a new literature.
It was a momentous occasion: Stalin and Gorky were the two most famous men in Russia, their relationship a barometer of Soviet literature itself. Ever since the late twenties, Gorky had been so close to Stalin that he had holidayed with Stalin and Nadya.1 Born Maxim Peshkov in 1868, he had used his own bitter (hence his nom de plume, Gorky) experiences as an orphaned street Arab, who had survived “vile abominations” living on scraps among outcasts in peasant villages, to write masterpieces that inspired the Revolution. But in 1921, disillusioned with Lenin’s dictatorship, he went into exile in a villa in Sorrento, Italy. Stalin put out feelers to lure him back. Meanwhile Stalin had placed Soviet literature under RAPP (the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers), “the literary wing of Stalin’s Five-Year Plan for industry,” which harassed and attacked any writers who did not depict the Great Turn with ecstatic enthusiasm. Gorky and Stalin began a complex pas de deux in which vanity, money and power played their role in encouraging the writer to return. Gorky’s experience of the savage backwardness of the peasantry made him support Stalin’s war on the villages but he found the standard of RAPP literature to be dire. By 1930, Gorky’s life was already oiled with generous gifts from the GPU. 2
Stalin concentrated his feline charms on Gorky.47 In 1931, he returned to become Stalin’s literary ornament, granted a large allowance as well as the millions he made from his books. He lived in the mansion in Moscow that had belonged to the tycoon Ryabushinsky, a large dacha outside the capital and a palatial villa in the Crimea along with numerous staff, all GPU agents. Gorky’s houses became the headquarters of the intelligentsia where he helped brilliant young writers like Isaac Babel and Vasily Grossman.
The magnates embraced Gorky as their own literary celebrity while the Chekist Yagoda took over the details of running Gorky’s household, spending more and more time there himself. Stalin took his children to see Gorky where they played with his grandchildren; Mikoyan brought his sons to play with Gorky’s pet monkey. Voroshilov came for sing-songs. Gorky’s granddaugher Martha played with Babel one day; Yagoda the next.
Stalin liked him: “Gorky was here,” he wrote to Voroshilov in an undated note. “We talked about things. A good, clever, friendly person. He’s fond of our policy. He understands everything . . . In politics he’s with us against the Right.” But he was also aware of Gorky as an asset who could be bought. In 1932, Stalin ordered the celebration of Gorky’s forty literary years. His home town, Nizhny Novgorod, was renamed after him. So was Moscow’s main street, Tverskaya. When Stalin named the Moscow Art Theatre after the writer, the literary bureaucrat Ivan Gronsky retorted: “But Comrade Stalin, the Moscow Art Theatre is really more associated with Chekhov.”
“That doesn’t matter. Gorky’s a vain man. We must bind him with cables to the Party,” replied Stalin.3 It worked: during the kulak liquidation, Gorky unleashed his hatred of the backward peasants in Pravda: “If the enemy does not surrender, he must be exterminated.” He toured concentration camps and admired their re-educational value. He supported slave labour projects such as the Belomor Canal which he visited with Yagoda, whom he congratulated: “You rough fellows do not realize what great work you’re doing!”4
Yagoda, the dominant secret policeman, followed in Stalin’s wake. “The first generation of young Chekists . . . was distinguished by its sophisticated tastes and weakness for literature,” wrote Nadezhda Mandelstam. “The Chekists were the avant-garde of the New People.” The grand seigneurof this avant-garde was Yagoda, thirty-nine, who now fell in love with Gorky’s daughter-in-law, Timosha; she was “young, very beautiful, merry, simple, delightful” and married to Max Peshkov.
Son of a jeweller, trained as a statistician and learning pharmacy as a chemist’s assistant, Genrikh Yagoda (his real first name was Enoch), who had joined the Party in 1907, was also from Nizhny Novgorod, which gave him his calling card. “Superior to” the creatures that followed him, according to Anna Larina, Yagoda became “a corrupt . . . careerist,” but he was never Stalin’s man. He had been closer to the Rightists but swapped sides in 1929. His great achievement, supported by Stalin, was the creation by slave labour of the vast economic empire of the Gulags. Yagoda himself was devious, short and balding, always in full uniform, with a taste for French wines and sex toys: another green-fingered killer, he boasted that his huge dacha bloomed with “2000 orchids and roses,” while spending almost four million roubles decorating his residences.48 He frequented Gorky’s houses, courting Timosha with bouquets of his orchids. 5 Gorky was appointed head of the Writers’ Union and advised Stalin to scrap the RAPP, which was abolished in April 1932, causing both delight and confusion among the intelligentsia, who eagerly hoped for some improvement. Then came this invitation.
Playing ominously with a pearl-handled penknife and now suddenly “stern,” with a “taste of iron” in his voice, Stalin proposed: “The artist ought to show life truthfully. And if he shows our life truthfully he cannot fail to show it moving to socialism. This is, and will be, Socialist Realism.” In other words, the writers had to describe what life should be, a panegyric to the Utopian future, not what life was. Then there was a touch of farce, as usual provided unconsciously by Voroshilov: “You produce the goods that we need,” said Stalin. “Even more than machines, tanks, aeroplanes, we need human souls.” But Voroshilov, ever the simpleton, took this literally and interrupted Stalin to object that tanks were also “very important.”
The writers, Stalin declared, were “engineers of human souls,” a striking phrase of boldness and crudity—and he jabbed a finger at those sitting closest to him.
“Me? Why me?” retorted the nearest writer. “I’m not arguing.”
“What’s the good of just not arguing?” interrupted Voroshilov again. “You have to get on with it.” By now, some of the writers were drunk on Gorky’s wine and the heady aroma of power. Stalin filled their glasses. Alexander Fadeev, the drunken novelist and most notorious of literary bureaucrats, asked Stalin’s favourite Cossack novelist, Mikhail Sholokhov, to sing. The writers clinked glasses with Stalin.
“Let’s drink to the health of Comrade Stalin,” called out the poet Lugovskoi. The novelist Nikoforov jumped up and said: “I’m fed up with this! We’ve drunk Stalin’s health one million one hundred and forty-seven thousand times. He’s probably fed up with it himself . . .”
There was silence. But Stalin shook Nikoforov’s hand: “Thank you, Nikoforov, thank you. I am fed up with it.”6
Nonetheless Stalin never tired of dealing with writers. Mandelstam was right when he mused that poetry was more respected in Russia, where “people are killed for it,” than anywhere else. Literature mattered greatly to Stalin. He may have demanded “engineers of the human soul” but he was himself far from the oafish philistine which his manners would suggest. He not only admired and appreciated great literature, he discerned the difference between hackery and genius. Ever since the seminary in the 1890s, he had read voraciously, claiming a rate of five hundred pages daily: in exile, when a fellow prisoner died, Stalin purloined his library and refused to share it with his outraged comrades. His hunger for literary knowledge was almost as driving as his Marxist faith and megalomania: one might say these were the ruling passions of his life. He did not possess literary talents himself but in terms of his reading alone, he was an intellectual, despite being the son of a cobbler and a washerwoman. Indeed, it would be no exaggeration to say that Stalin was the best-read ruler of Russia from Catherine the Great up to Vladimir Putin, even including Lenin who was no mean intellectual himself and had enjoyed the benefits of a nobleman’s education.
“He worked very hard to improve himself,” said Molotov. His library consisted of 20,000 well-used volumes. “If you want to know the people around you,” Stalin said, “find out what they read.” Svetlana found books there from the Life of Jesus to the novels of Galsworthy,49 Wilde, Maupassant and later Steinbeck and Hemingway. His granddaughter later noticed him reading Gogol, Chekhov, Hugo, Thackeray and Balzac. In old age, he was still discovering Goethe. He “worshipped Zola.”
The Bolsheviks, who believed in the perfectibility of the New Man, were avid autodidacts, Stalin being the most accomplished and diligent of all. He read seriously, making notes, learning quotations, like an omnipotent student, leaving his revealing marginalia in books varying from Anatole France to Vipper’s History of Ancient Greece. He had “a very good knowledge of antiquity and mythology,” recalled Molotov. He could quote from the Bible, Chekhov and Good Soldier Svejk, as well as Napoleon, Bismarck and Talleyrand. His knowledge of Georgian literature was such that he debated arcane poetry with Shalva Nutsibidze, the philosopher, who said, long after Stalin was no longer a god, that his editorial comments were outstanding. He read literature aloud to his circle—usually Saltykov-Shchedrin or a new edition of the medieval Georgian epic poem by Rustaveli, The Knight in the Panther Skin. He adored The Last of the Mohicans, amazing a young translator whom he greeted in faux–Red Indian: “Big chief greets paleface!”
His deeply conservative tastes remained nineteenth century even during the Modernist blossoming of the twenties: he was always much happier with Pushkin and Tchaikovsky than with Akhmatova and Shostakovich. He respected intellectuals, his tone changing completely when dealing with a famous professor. “I’m very sorry that I’m unable to satisfy your request now, illustrious Nikolai Yakovlevich,” he wrote to the linguistics professor Marr. “After the conference, I’ll be able to give us 40–50 minutes if you’ll agree . . .”
Stalin could certainly appreciate genius, but as with love and family, his belief in Marxist progress was brutally paramount. He admired that “great psychologist” Dostoevsky but banned him because he was “bad for young people.” He enjoyed the satires of the Leningrad satirist Mikhail Zoshchenko so much, even though they mocked Soviet bureaucrats, he used to read extracts to his two boys, Vasily and Artyom, and would laugh at the end: “Here is where Comrade Zoshchenko remembered the GPU and changed the ending!”—a joke typical of his brutal cynicism crossed with dry gallows humour. He recognized that Mandelstam, Pasternak and Bulgakov were geniuses, but their work was suppressed. Yet he could tolerate whimsical maestros: Bulgakov and Pasternak were never arrested. But woe betide anyone, genius or hack, who insulted the person or policy of Stalin—for the two were synonymous.
His comments are most fascinating when he was dealing with a master like Bulgakov whose Civil War play, Days of the Turbins, based on his novel The White Guard, was Stalin’s favourite: he saw it fifteen times. When Bulgakov’s play Flight was attacked as “anti-Soviet and Rightist,” Stalin wrote to the theatre director: “It’s not good calling literature Right and Left. These are Party words. In literature, use class, anti-Soviet, revolutionary or anti-revolutionary but not Right or Left . . . If Bulgakov would add to the eight dreams, one or two where he would discover the international social content of the Civil War, the spectator would understand that the honest “Serafima” and the professor were thrown away from Russia, not by the caprice of Bolsheviks, but because they lived on the necks of the people. It’s easy to criticize Days of the Turbins—it’s easy to reject but it’s hardest to write good plays. The final impression of the play is good for Bolshevism.” When Bulgakov was not allowed to work, he appealed to Stalin who telephoned him to say, “We’ll try to do something for you.”
Stalin’s gift, apart from his catechismic rhythms of question and answer, was the ability to reduce complex problems to lucid simplicity, a talent that is invaluable in a politician. He could draft, usually in his own hand, a diplomatic telegram, speech or article straight off in the clearest, yet often subtle prose (as he showed during the war)—but he was also capable of clumsy crudity, though partly this reflected his self-conscious proletarian machismo.
Stalin was not just supreme censor; he relished his role as imperial editor-in-chief,50 endlessly tinkering with other men’s prose, loving nothing more than scribbling the expression that covers the pages of his library—that mirthless chuckle: “Ha-ha-ha!” 7
Stalin’s sneering did not help Nadya whose depression, stoked by caffeine and Stalin’s own stress, worsened. Yet there were also moments of touching tenderness: Nadya took an unaccustomed drink which made her sick. Stalin put her to bed and she looked up at him and said pathetically, “So you love me a little after all.” Years later, Stalin recounted this to his daughter.
At Zubalovo for the weekend, Nadya, who never gave Svetlana a word of praise, warned her to refuse if Stalin offered her wine: “Don’t take the alcohol!” If Nadya was taking Stalin’s small indulgence of his children as a grave sin, one can only imagine how desperately she felt about his brusqueness, never mind the tragedy of the peasants. During those last days, Nadya visited her brother Pavel and his wife Zhenya, who had just returned from Berlin, in their apartment in the House on the Embankment: “She said hello to me in the coldest way,” their daughter Kira noticed, but then Nadya was a stern woman. Nadya spent some evenings working on designs with Dora Khazan, whispering in the bedroom of the latter’s daughter, Natalya Andreyeva.
So we are left with a troubling picture of a husband and wife who alternated between loving kindness and vicious explosions of rage, parents who treated the children differently. Both were given to humiliating one another in public, yet Nadya still seemed to have loved “my man,” as she called him. It was a tense time but there was one difference between this highly strung, thin-skinned couple. Stalin was crushingly strong, as Nadya told his mother: “I can say that I marvel at his strength and his energy. Only a really healthy man could stand the amount of work he gets through.” She on the other hand was weak. If one was to break, it was she. His stunted emotional involvement allowed him to weather the hardest blows.
Kaganovich again headed out of his Moscow fiefdom to crush dissent in the Kuban, ordering mass reprisals against the Cossacks and deporting fifteen villages to Siberia. Kaganovich called this “the resistance of the last remnants of the dying classes leading to a concrete form of the class struggle.” The classes were dying all right. Kopelev saw “women and children with distended bellies, turning blue, still breathing but with vacant lifeless eyes. And corpses—corpses in ragged sheepskin coats and cheap felt boots; corpses in peasant huts, in the melting snow of old Vologda, under the bridges of Kharkov.” “Iron Lazar” arranged an array of executions of grain hoarders and was back in time for the fatal holiday dinner for the anniversary of the Revolution.
On 7 November, the potentates took the salute from atop Lenin’s newly completed grey marble Mausoleum. They gathered early in Stalin’s apartment in their greatcoats and hats for it was below freezing. Nadya was already taking her place in the parade as a delegate of the Academy. The housekeeper and nannies made sure Vasily and Artyom were dressed and ready; Svetlana was still at the dacha.
Just before 8 a.m., the leaders walked chatting out of the Poteshny Palace across the central square, past the Yellow Palace towards the steps that led up to the Mausoleum. It was bitterly cold up there; the parade lasted four hours.51 Voroshilov and Budyonny waited on horseback at different Kremlin gates. As the Spassky Tower, Moscow’s equivalent of Big Ben, tolled, they trotted out to meet in the middle in front of the Mausoleum, then dismounted to join the leadership.
Many people saw Nadya that day. She did not seem either depressed or unhappy with Stalin. She marched past, raising her oval face towards the leaders. Afterwards she met up with Vasily and Artyom on the tribune to the right of the Mausoleum, and bumped into Khrushchev, whom she had introduced to Stalin. She looked up at her husband in his greatcoat, but like any wife, she worried that Stalin’s coat was open: “My man didn’t take his scarf. He’ll catch cold and get sick,” she said—but suddenly she was struck with one of her agonizing headaches. “She started moaning, ‘Oh my headache!’ ” remembers Artyom. After the parade, the boys requested the housekeeper to ask Nadya if they could spend the holiday at Zubalovo. It was easier to persuade the housekeeper than tackle the severe mother.
“Let them go to the dacha,” Nadya replied, adding cheerfully, “I’ll soon graduate from the Academy and then there’ll be a real holiday for everyone!” She winced. “Oh! My headache!” Stalin, Voroshilov and others were carousing in the little room behind the Mausoleum where there was always a buffet.
Next morning the boys were driven off to Zubalovo. Stalin worked as usual in his office, meeting Molotov, Kuibyshev and CC Secretary Pavel Postyshev. Yagoda showed them the transcripts of another anti-Stalin meeting of the Old Bolsheviks, Smirnov and Eismont, one of whom had said, “Don’t tell me there’s nobody in this whole country capable of removing him.” They ordered their arrest, then they walked over to the Voroshilovs’ for dinner. Nadya too was on her way there. She looked her best.8
Some time in the early hours, Nadya took the Mauser pistol that her brother Pavel had given her and lay on the bed in her room. Suicide was a Bolshevik death: she had attended the funeral of Adolf Yoffe, the Trotskyite who protested against Stalin’s defeat of the oppositions by shooting himself in 1929. In 1930, the Modernist poet Mayakovsky also made that supreme protest. She raised the pistol to her breast and pulled the trigger once. No one heard the voice of that tiny feminine weapon; Kremlin walls are thick. Her body rolled off the bed onto the floor.9