special interest in Nikolai Yezhov, a young official who would be the secret police chief during the coming Terror: “They say that if Yezhov extends his holidays for a month or two, it’s not so bad. Let’s prolong his holiday… I’m voting ‘for.’” Yezhov was clearly a man to watch.
38
Later, the old dictator would preside over drinking contests in which his guests would have to drink a cup of vodka for every degree they got wrong.
39
Mikoyan was the Vicar of Bray of Soviet politics. “From Illich [Lenin] to Illich [Leonid Illich Brezhnev],” went the Russian saying, “without accident or stroke!” A veteran Soviet official described Mikoyan thus: “The rascal was able to walk through Red Square on a rainy day without an umbrella [and] without getting wet. He could dodge the raindrops.”
40
Beal, the American, reported to the Chairman of Ukraine’s Central Executive Committee (the titular President), Petrovsky, who replied: “We know millions are dying. That is unfortunate but the glorious future of the Soviet Union will justify it.” By 1933, it is estimated that 1.1 million households, that is seven million people, lost their holdings and half of them were deported. As many as three million households were liquidated. At the start of this process in 1931, there were 13 million households collectivized out of roughly 25 million. By 1937, 18.5 million were collectivized but there were now only 19.9 million households: 5.7 million households, perhaps 15 million persons, had been deported, many of them dead.
41
If anything, the Old Bolsheviks had a religious education: Stalin, Yenukidze and Mikoyan were seminarists, Voroshilov a choirboy; Kalinin attended church into his teens. Even Beria’s mother spent so much time at church, she actually died there. Kaganovich’s Jewish parents were
42
The Alliluyevs had only recently returned from Germany and they were shocked by the changes: “There were barriers and queues everywhere,” remembers Kira. “Everyone was hungry and scared. My mother was ashamed to wear the dresses she brought back. Everyone made fun of European fashions.”
43
Margaret Thatcher used a similar expression about her favourite minister, Lord Young: “He brings me solutions: others bring me problems.” Every leader prizes such lieutenants.
44
Stalin felt the “circle of friends,” tempered by the fight with the oppositions, was falling apart under the pressure of crisis and rows between Sergo and Molotov, as he confided in Kaganovich: Comrade Kuibyshev, already an alcoholic, “creates a bad impression. It seems he flees from work… Still worse is the conduct of Comrade Ordzhonikidze. The latter evidently does not take into account that his conduct (with sharpness against Comrades Molotov and Kuibyshev) leads to the undermining of our leading group.” Furthermore, Stalin was dissatisfied with Kosior and Rudzutak among others in the Politburo.
45
Just as the grain fuelled the industrial engine, so did the peasants themselves. The same week, Stalin and Sergo, on holiday in Sochi, ordered Kaganovich and Molotov to transfer another 20,000 slave labourers, probably kulaks, to work on their new industrial city, Magnitogorsk. The repression was perhaps used deliberately to provide slave labour.
46
None of the great writers, like Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Pasternak, Bulgakov or Babel, were there but Sholokhov, whom Stalin regarded as “a great artistic talent,” was present.
47
“During the Congress I was busy with work,” he wrote to Gorky during 1930 in a friendly, confiding tone. “Now things are different and I can write. It’s not of course good, but now we have the opportunity to smooth out the fault. “No fault, no repentance, no repentance, no salvation.” They say you’re writing a play about the wreckers and you want new material. I’m gathering material and will send it to you… When are you coming to the USSR?” He treated Gorky almost as a member of the Soviet government, consulting him on Molotov’s promotion. If he was late in his replies, Stalin apologized for his “swinish” behaviour.
48
Voroshilov, another Bolshevik
