“I can,” answered Stalin. “Let’s head out of town and take him with us.”21 The war of extermination in the countryside in no way restrained the magnates’ country-house existence. They had been assigned dachas soon after the Revolution where, often, the real power was brokered.
At the centre of this idyllic life was Zubalovo, near Usovo, 35 kilometres outside Moscow, where Stalin and several others had their dachas. Before the Revolution, a Baku oil nabob named Zubalov had built two walled estates, each with a mansion, one for his son, one for himself. There were four houses altogether, gabled Gothic dachas of German design. The Mikoyans shared the Big House at Zubalovo Two with a Red Army commander, a Polish Communist and Pavel Alliluyev. Voroshilov and other commanders shared a Little House. Their wives and children constantly visited one another—the extended family of the Revolution enjoying a Chekhovian summer.
Stalin’s Zubalovo One was a magical world for the children. “It was a real life of freedom,” recalls Artyom. “Such happiness,” thought Svetlana. The parents lived upstairs, the children downstairs. The gardens were “sunny and abundant,” wrote Svetlana. Stalin was an enthusiastic gardener though he preferred inspecting and clipping roses to real labour. Photographs show him taking his little children for strolls round the gardens. There was a library, a billiard room, a Russian bath and later a cinema. Svetlana adored this “happy sheltered life” with its vegetable gardens, orchards and a farm where they milked cows and fed geese, chickens and guinea fowl, cats and white rabbits. “We had huge white lilacs, dark purple lilacs, jasmine which my mother loved, and a very fragrant shrub with a lemony smell. We walked in the woods with nanny. Picked wild strawberries and black currants and cherries.”
“Stalin’s house,” remembers Artyom, “was full of friends.” Nadya’s parents Sergei and Olga were always there—though they now lived apart. They stayed at different ends of the house but bickered at table. While Sergei enjoyed mending anything in the house and was friendly with the servants, Olga, according to Svetlana, “threw herself into the role of grand lady and loved her high position which my mother never did.”
Nadya played tennis with an immaculate Voroshilov, when he was sober, and Kaganovich, who played in his tunic and boots. Mikoyan, Voroshilov and Budyonny[29] rode horses donated by the Cavalry Inspectorate. If it was winter, Kaganovich and Mikoyan skied. Molotov pulled his daughter in a sledge like a nag pulling a peasant’s plough. Voroshilov and Sergo were avid hunters. Stalin preferred billiards. The Andreyevs took up rock climbing which they regarded as a most Bolshevik pursuit. Even in 1930, Bukharin was often at Zubalovo with his wife and daughter. He brought some of his menagerie of animals—his pet foxes ran around the grounds. Nadya was close to “Bukharchik” and they often walked together. Yenukidze was also a member of this extended family. But there was always business to be done too.
The children were used to the bodyguards and secretaries: the bodyguards were part of the family. Pauker, the head of the Guards Directorate, and Stalin’s own bodyguard, Nikolai Vlasik, were always there. “Pauker was great fun. He liked children like all Jews and did not have a high opinion of himself but Vlasik strutted around like a stuffed turkey,” says Kira Alliluyeva, Stalin’s niece.
Karl Pauker, thirty-six, was the children’s favourite, and important to Stalin himself. A symbol of the cosmopolitan culture of the Cheka of that time, this Jewish-Hungarian had been hairdresser at the Budapest Opera before being conscripted into the Austro-Hungarian army, captured by the Russians in 1916 and converted to Bolshevism. He was an accomplished actor, performing accents, especially Jewish ones, for Stalin. Rotund, with his belly held in by a (much-mocked) corset, bald, perfumed, with a scarlet sensuous mouth, this showman loved elaborate OGPU uniforms and pranced around on 1?-inch-heeled boots. He sometimes returned to hairdressing, shaving Stalin like a valet, using talcum powder to fill the pock-marks. The font of delicacies, cars and new products for the Politburo, he kept the secrets of the magnates’ private lives. Said to provide mistresses for Kalinin and Voroshilov, he procured girls for Stalin himself.
Pauker used to show off his Cadillac, a gift from Stalin, to the children. Long before Stalin officially agreed to bring back the Christmas tree in 1936, Pauker played Father Christmas, delivering presents round the Kremlin and running Christmas parties for the children. The secret policeman as Father Christmas is a symbol of this strange world.22
The other figure who was never far away was Stalin’s
When Stalin exerted his patronage, helping a protege get an apartment, it was Poskrebyshev who actually did the work: “I ask you to HELP THEM IMMEDIATELY,” Stalin typically wrote to him. “Inform me by letter about quick and exact carrying out of this request.” Lost in the archives until now is Stalin’s correspondence with Poskrebyshev: here we find Stalin teasing his secretary: “I’m receiving English newspapers but not German… why? How could it be that you make a mistake? Is it bureaucratism? Greetings. J. Stalin.” Sometimes he was in the doghouse: in 1936, one finds on one of Stalin’s list of things to do: “1. To forgive Poskrebyshev and his friends.”
The sad, twitchy face of this Quasimodo was a weather vane of the leader’s favour. If he was friendly, you were in favour. If not, he sometimes whispered, “You’re in for it today.” The
Poskrebyshev was part buffoon, part monster, but he later suffered grievously at Stalin’s hands. According to his daughter Natalya, he asked if he could study medicine but Stalin made him study economics instead. But in the end, this half-trained nurse provided the only medical care Stalin received.23
Stalin rose late, at about eleven, took breakfast and worked during the day on his piles of papers, which he carried around wrapped in the newspaper—he did not like briefcases. When he was sleeping, anxious parents begged children to be quiet.
The big daytime meal was an expansive “brunch” at 3–4 p.m. with all the family and, of course, half the Politburo and their wives. When there were visitors, Stalin played the Georgian host. “He was elaborately hospitable in that Asiatic way,” remembers Leonid Redens, his nephew. “He was very kind to the children.” Whenever Stalin’s brood needed someone to play with, there were their Alliluyev cousins, Pavel’s children, Kira, Sasha and Sergei, and the younger boys of Anna Redens. Then there was the Bolshevik family: Mikoyan’s popular sons, whom Stalin nicknamed the “Mikoyanchiks,” only had to scamper over from next door.
The children ran around together but Svetlana found there were too many boys and not enough girls to play with. Her brother Vasily bullied her and showed off by telling her sexual stories that she later admitted disturbed and upset her. “Stalin was very loving to Svetlana but he did not really like the boys,” recalls Kira. He invented an imaginary girl named Lelka who was Svetlana’s perfect alter ego. Weak Vasily was already a problem. Nadya understood this and gave him more attention. But Bolshevik parents did not raise their children: they were brought up by nannies and tutors: “It was like an aristocratic family in Victorian times,” says Svetlana. “So were the others, the Kaganoviches, Molotovs, Voroshilovs… But the ladies of that top circle were all working so my mother did not dress or feed me. I don’t remember any physical affection from her but she was very fond of my brother. She certainly loved me, I could tell, but she was a disciplinarian.” Once when she cut up a tablecloth, her mother spanked her hard.
Stalin kissed and squeezed Svetlana with “overflowing Georgian affection” but she claimed later that she did not like his “smell of tobacco and bristly moustache.” Her mother, whose love was so hard to earn, became the untouchable saint in her eyes.
The Bolsheviks, who believed it was possible to create a Leninist “New Man,” placed stern emphasis on education.[30] The magnates were semi-educated autodidacts who never stopped studying, so their children were expected to work hard and grew up much more cultured than their parents, speaking three languages which they had learned from special tutors. (The Stalin and Molotov children shared the same English tutor.)
The Party did not merely come
