Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar

officials and secret policemen.

The magnates were so close they were like a family: “Uncle Abel” Yenukidze (left) was Nadya’s godfather, Stalin’s old friend, a senior official and a sybaritic bachelor with a taste for ballerinas. Stalin came to resent his familiarity. Voroshilov (on the right), dapper, good-natured, stupid, envious and brutal, made his name in the Battle of Tsaritsyn and, in 1937, supervised the massacre of about 40,000 of his own officers.

In 1933, the first year after Nadya’s death, Stalin’s holiday was recorded by the secret police in a special private album given to him afterwards: it shows the surprising intimacy and informality of his life during the holiday months. Stalin particularly enjoyed picnics. Here he and Voroshilov (in braces) go camping (above). Stalin adored gardening, weeding at his Sochi dacha (left)—he loved roses, but mimosas were his favourites. He was less keen on hunting, but (below) sets off with (from left) Budyonny, Voroshilov and his Chekist crony Evdokimov.

Holidays were the best time to get to know Stalin: there was frantic networking among the grandees—even the most trivial activities were politically significant if they brought the courtiers close to the Boss. Young Lavrenti Beria, Georgian leader and vicious sadist, offered to help weed the gardens: placing an axe in his belt (above), he told Stalin that there was no tree that he would not chop down. Stalin understood.

Stalin with Lakoba and Kirov, embarking on a fishing and shooting trip on the Black Sea which was to end in a mysterious assassination attempt—did Beria arrange it? Stalin inspects the fishing catch.

Molotov, Premier during the 1930s, was the second most important leader after Stalin, who enjoyed teasing him. He was dominated by his wife Polina, to whom he wrote passionate love letters. Here on holiday he plays tennis with his family; in winter, he pulled his spoilt daughter on her sledge. But this Soviet Robespierre believed in terror and never regretted signing the death warrants of the wives of his friends. Stalin nicknamed him “Molotstein”—or more fondly, “our Vecha.”

This is how Stalin ruled his empire: with his family and friends around him, sitting out in the sun at the Sochi dacha, reading hundreds of pages and writing his orders in red crayon, while his henchmen fight brutal duels for his favour. Beria stands like a guard behind him, having already fallen out with his patron Lakoba (right), while Svetlana (who called Beria “Uncle Lara”) plays around them. Within five years, Lakoba and his entire family were dead.

1934–1941

Stalin’s friendship was suffocating. After Nadya’s death, Sergei Kirov, the handsome, easygoing Leningrad boss, became Stalin’s closest friend—here, he holidays with Stalin and Svetlana at Sochi. But there was tension when Kirov became dangerously popular. Did Stalin arrange his death?

Even before Kirov’s assassination, Andrei Zhdanov, ebullient, burly yet frail, pretentious, self-important and ruthless, became Stalin’s favourite—the only other magnate who qualified as his “fellow intellectual.” Here Zhdanov joins the family, probably at the Coldstream dacha (from left): Vasily, Zhdanov, Svetlana, Stalin and Yakov. Right: On the same occasion, Stalin and Svetlana.

The Court of the Red Tsar in the mid-1930s. Stalin is surrounded by his male comrades and the circle of outspoken, bossy women who ultimately became over-familiar and paid the price. On 21 December 1934, still reeling from the assassination of Kirov, the courtiers, family and grandees gathered for Stalin’s birthday at his Kuntsevo dacha and were photographed by General Vlasik. Lakoba and Beria arrived late. (Back row standing, from left): Stan Redens; Kaganovich; Molotov; Alyosha Svanidze; Anna Alliluyeva Redens; Vlas Chubar; Dora Khazan (married to Andreyev); Andrei Andreyev; Zinaida Ordzhonikidze; Pavel Alliluyev. (Middle Row): Maria Svanidze; Maria Kaganovich; Sashiko Svanidze; Stalin; Polina Molotova; Voroshilov. (Front row): unknown, possibly Shalva Eliava; Lakoba; possibly Lakoba’s wife; Sergo Ordzhonikidze; Zhenya Alliluyeva; Bronislava Poskrebysheva; unknown; and (at the bottom front) Beria; Mikoyan and Poskrebyshev.

Stalin’s women: his beaming mistress Zhenya Alliluyeva sits at his feet in her lace collar; she said what she liked to Stalin and it made her enemies. Pretty Bronislava Poskrebysheva sits to the right of Zhenya. Bronislava’s daughter claims her mother was also Stalin’s mistress. Nonetheless she was liquidated.

Stalin micro-managed the theatre as he dominated cinema, literature and politics. The grandees ate in the avant-loge behind the box in between scenes. Here in the former imperial box at the Bolshoi sit (from left): Voroshilov, Kaganovich, Stalin, Sergo Ordzhonikidze, Mikoyan and their wives.

Stalin’s mother Keke possessed the same sardonic and mocking wit as her son. They were not close but Stalin sent dutiful letters, leaving Beria to act as his surrogate son. Shortly before her death when Stalin was on holiday in Georgia, Beria arranged for him to visit the ailing Keke. Former friends, now bitter rivals, Beria and Lakoba sit behind mother and son in her bedroom.

Like three boulevardiers in the sun, Beria, the Caucasian viceroy (centre), hosts Voroshilov and Mikoyan (right) in Tiflis for the Rustaveli Festival at the height of the Terror, 1937.

A Jewish jeweller’s son with a knowledge of poisons and a ruthless ambition, Genrikh Yagoda was the NKVD boss who had reservations about the Terror. Stalin threatened to punch him in the face. Yagoda enjoyed the good life: collecting wines, growing orchids, courting Gorky’s daughter-in-law, amassing ladies’ underwear, and buying German pornographic films and obscene cigarette holders. Left to right: Yagoda in uniform, Kalinin, Stalin, Molotov, Vyshinsky, Beria.

Marshal Semyon Budyonny, swaggering Cossack horseman and hero of Tsaritsyn, famous for his handlebar moustaches, white teeth and equine level of intelligence, poses with Kaganovich (on the left) and Stalin among swooning females. Budyonny proved a better general than most of Stalin’s cavalry cronies, but he was happiest breeding horses, which he believed were more useful than tanks.

The two most depraved monsters of Stalin’s court. At the Seventeenth Congress in 1934 when they joined the leadership (but before their rise to supreme power), Beria and Yezhov, a rising Central Committee official, hug for the camera. Yezhov was an ambitious fanatic, good-natured, if prone to illness, a bisexual dwarf who was liked by everyone until he was promoted to NKVD boss in 1936 and became Stalin’s frenzied killer. Beria was an unscrupulous but able and intelligent secret policeman. In 1938, he was brought to Moscow to destroy Yezhov, whose execution he supervised.

Ascendant grandee Yezhov (hugging his adopted daughter Natasha) and his promiscuous literary wife Yevgenia, who slept with writers from Isaac Babel to Mikhail Sholokhov, entertain their