Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar

from exile increased in proportion to his material needs: “Dearest darling Tatiana Alexandrovna,” he wrote in December 1913, “I received your parcel but you really didn’t need to buy new undergarments… I don’t know how to repay you, my darling sweetheart!”

7

This was not lost on another peasant boy who was born only a few hundred miles from Gori: Saddam Hussein. A Kurdish leader, Mahmoud Osman, who negotiated with him, observed that Saddam’s study and bedroom were filled with books on Stalin. Today, Stalin’s birthplace, the hut in Gori, is embraced magnificently by a white- pillared marble temple built by Lavrenti Beria and remains the centrepiece of Stalin Boulevard, close to the Stalin Museum.

8

I am grateful to Gela Charkviani for sharing with me the unpublished but fascinating manuscript of the memoirs of his father, Candide Charkviani, First Secretary of the Georgian Party, 1938–1951. In old age, Stalin spent hours telling Charkviani about his childhood. Charkviani writes that he tried to find Beso’s grave in the Tiflis cemetery but could not. He found photographs meant to show Beso and asked Stalin to identify him, but Stalin stated that these did not show his father. It is therefore unlikely that the usual photograph said to show Beso is correct. On Stalin’s paternity, the Egnatashvili family emphatically deny that the innkeeper was Stalin’s father.

9

The son Konstantin Kuzakov enjoyed few privileges except that it is said that during the Purges, when he came under suspicion, he appealed to his real father who wrote “Not to be touched” on his file—but that may be simply because he was the son of a woman who was kind to Stalin in exile. In 1995, after a successful career as a television executive, Kuzakov, in an article headed “Son of Stalin,” announced: “I was still a child when I learned I was Stalin’s son.” There was almost certainly another child from a later exile.

10

The recent Secret File of Stalin by Roman Brackman claims the entire Terror was Stalin’s attempt to wipe out anyone with knowledge of his duplicity. Yet there were many reasons for the Terror, though Stalin’s character was a major cause. Stalin liquidated many of those who had known him in the early days, yet he mysteriously preserved others. He also killed over a million victims who had no knowledge of his early life. However, Brackman also gives an excellent account of the intrigues and betrayals of underground life.

11

Stalin later seemed to confirm the story of the sinking barge in a fascinating letter to Voroshilov: “The summer after the assassination attempt on Lenin we… made a list of officers whom we gathered in the Manege… to shoot en masse… So the Tsaritsyn barge was the result not of the struggle against military specialists but momentum from the centre…” Five future Second World War marshals fought at Tsaritsyn: in ascending competence—Kulik, Voroshilov, Budyonny, Timoshenko and Zhukov (though the latter fought there in 1919 after Stalin’s departure).

12

Stalin was never the titular Head of State of the Soviet Union, nor was Lenin. Kalinin’s title was the Chairman of the Central Executive Committee, technically the highest legislative body, but he was colloquially the “President.” After the 1936 Constitution, his title was Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet. Only with the Brezhnev Constitution did the Secretary-General of the Party add the Presidency to his titles. The Bolsheviks coined a new jargon of acronyms in their effort to create a new sort of government. People’s Commissars (Narodny Komissar) were known as Narkoms. The government or Council (Soviet) of People’s Commissars was known as Sovnarkom.

13

Stalin’s row with Lenin’s wife, Krupskaya, outraged Lenin’s bourgeois sentiments. But Stalin thought it was entirely consistent with Party culture: “Why should I stand on my hind legs for her? To sleep with Lenin does not mean you understand Marxism-Leninism. Just because she used the same toilet as Lenin…” This led to some classic Stalin jokes, in which he warned Krupskaya that if she did not obey, the Central Committee would appoint someone else as Lenin’s wife. That is a very Bolshevik concept. His disrespect for Krupskaya was probably not helped by her complaints about Lenin’s flirtations with his assistants, including Yelena Stasova, the one whom Stalin threatened to promote to “wife.”

14

Of course Kaganovich kept the moustache which remained fashionable. Even facial hair was then based on the leader cult: if a client wanted a goatee with beard and moustache, he would ask his barber for a “Kalinin” after the Politburo member. When Stalin ordered another leader, Bulganin, to chop off his beard, he compromised by keeping a “Kalinin” goatee.

15

Stalin followed the same principle with his clothes: he refused to replace his meagre wardrobe of two or three much-darned tunics, old trousers and his favourite greatcoat and cap from the Civil War. He was not alone in this sartorial asceticism but he was aware that, like Frederick the Great whom he had studied, his deliberately modest old clothes only accentuated his natural authority. As for his boots, the cobbler’s son always took care to cultivate his martial air: he commissioned a special pair in Tsaritsyn in 1918 and later had them made in soft leather. When he got corns, he cut holes in the leather.