Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar

terrorist counter-revolutionary group” in Leninsk-Kuznetsk and were imprisoned for eight months, until the NKVD themselves were arrested and the children released.

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Stalin’s papers contain fascinating glimpses of his interventions: a father denounced his son to the police for having too many outrageous parties but the boy was arrested and embroiled in a case against Tomsky. The father appealed to Stalin who wrote on his note: “It’s necessary to change the punishment!” The father wrote to thank Stalin.

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Yezhov replied in black: “In addition to the copy of Uzakovsky’s report sent to you, I sent another one of the 7th Division of GUGB [State Security] about the activities of Chinese-Trotskyites. Yezhov.”

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His huge portraits were borne past the Mausoleum on all the State holidays. The pun on the resemblance of his name to the “steel gauntlet” had now spawned vast posters showing his iron grip “strangling the snakes” with the heads of Trotsky, Rykov and Bukharin. The other Yezhovite slogan read: “Yezhovy rukavitsy—rule with an iron rod!”

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Alexandra Kollontai, at that time sixty-five and Ambassador to Sweden, was a beautiful Bolshevik noblewoman who wrote the manifesto of feminism and free love, her novel Love of Worker Bees. Her scandalous sex life shocked and amused Stalin and Molotov. Several of her famous Bolshevik lovers were shot in the Great Terror. Yet she herself survived. Perhaps her letters to Stalin, always addressed to “highly respected Joseph Vissarionovich” with “friendly greetings from an open heart” with the flirtatious romanticism of a once beautiful woman, appealed to his chivalry. Similarly, Stalin muttered to Dmitrov about the veteran Bolshevik Yelena Stasova that “we shall probably arrest Stasova. Turned out she’s scum.” Yet she was allowed to survive and continued to write Stalin warm letters of gratitude into honourable old age. In the Stalin family too, the women usually survived (though they were arrested) but the men were decimated.

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In their generation, the proud exception to this narrow-minded hypocrisy were those rare Bolsheviks who combined Party discipline with European Bohemianism, the Foreign Commissar Maxim Litvinov and his English wife Ivy. She sneered openly at humbugs like Molotov and flaunted her promiscuity with a parade of Germanic lovers: “I don’t care a pin what anyone says… for I feel head and shoulders taller than anyone who can gloat on such outworn topics of scandal as who sleeps with whom.” Meanwhile Commissar Litvinov, the plump, rumpled and tough Jewish intellectual who had known Stalin a long time but was never close to him, started an affair with a “very pretty, decidedly vulgar and very sexy indeed” girl who lodged with them. She even accompanied him to diplomatic receptions and arrived at the office in tight riding breeches.

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The primitive interrogators tried to suit the crime to the criminal with often absurd results: on his arrest, the First Secretary of the Jewish Autonomous Oblast in Birobizhan was appropriately accused of poisoning Kaganovich’s gefilte fish during his visit there. Presumably, throughout the many republics of the USSR, the poison was secreted in the national dishes—from the sausages of the Baltics to the spicy soups of the Buriats and the lamb stews of the Tajiks.

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At the end of 1936, when Stalin inaugurated the new Constitution, Shumiatsky, the film boss, asked Molotov if he could record Stalin’s speech. On 20 November, Molotov gave permission. Maltsev, the chief of the All-Union Committee of Radiofication and Radiosound, reported joyfully to Stalin that the speech had been successfully recorded and approved. Now he wanted permission to make it into a gramophone record “for you to hear it personally.” Stalin agreed. But on 29 April 1937, when the terrified officials of the Gramophone Trust Factory listened to the gramophone, something was wrong with Stalin’s voice. They immediately reported to Poskrebyshev that there were: “1. Big noises. 2. Big intervals. 3. The absence of whole phrases. 4. Closed grooves. And 5. Jumps and lack of clarity.” The file also contained a nervous analysis of the sibilance of Stalin’s voice and how hard it was to render on gramophone. Worse, a thousand of these records had been manufactured. Some officials wanted to recall the discs but, typically for the period, the chief attacked this suggestion for its disrespect to Comrade Stalin’s voice. He thought it more respectful to distribute them regardless of the gaps, noises, jumps. The file ends with a report from Komsomolskaya Pravda that suggested that something very sinister had happened to Comrade Stalin’s voice at the Gramophone Factory where the insistence of Comrade Straik to “distribute the discs more speedily” was a “strange position.” He was obviously a wrecker and all the guilty wreckers at the factory “must be harshly punished.” No doubt the NKVD came to listen to Comrade Straik’s record collection.

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Khrushchev was as fanatical a Stalinist terrorist as it was possible to be during the thirties yet his ability to destroy incriminating documents, and his memoirs, have shrouded his real conduct in mystery. A. N. Shelepin, ex- KGB boss, testified in 1988 that Khrushchev’s death lists had been removed by the secret policeman I.V. Serov. Two hundred and sixty-one pages of Khrushchev’s papers were burned between 2 and 9 July 1954.

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