Such absurdities abounded: in her terrible labour camp, Bukharin’s widow encountered this spirit when another prisoner informed on her because she owned a book named
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After interviewing Andreyev and Dora Khazan’s daughter Natasha and hearing of his innocence of all crimes, the author came upon this damning file. Andreyev’s notes and letters have survived because unlike his fellow criminals, such as Kaganovich, Malenkov and Khrushchev, he was out of power after Stalin’s death when the others managed to destroy so many incriminating documents.
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Lenin, Cheka founder Felix Dzerzhinsky, and the Foreign Commissar until 1930, Chicherin, were hereditary noblemen, as were Molotov, Zhdanov, Sergo and Tukhachevsky, according to Peter the Great’s Table of Ranks which decreed rank until 1917. None were titled nobility.
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Martha and her mother had been invited to Tiflis for the celebration of the poet Rustaveli’s 750th anniversary by Timosha’s new lover, Academician Lupel. There, through a slit in the door, she had seen him arrested at the dead of night: “I saw five men take him away,” she remembered. Timosha’s later affair with Stalin’s court architect, Merzhanov, also ended in his arrest. “I’m cursed,” Timosha Peshkova exclaimed. “Everyone I touch is ruined.”
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Nadezhda Mandelstam wrote beautifully of how she and her husband had lain awake in the Writers’ Union building until the lift had passed their floor.
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After Stalin’s death, the Serebryakovs managed to get half the property returned to them but the Vyshinskys kept the other half. Thus today, sixty years after their father was shot by their neighbour, the Serebryakovs spend each weekend next to the Vyshinskys.
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There were two Rosa Kaganoviches: Lazar’s sister Rosa died young in 1924 while his niece Rosa lived in Rostov and then moved to Moscow where she still lives. It is possible that they met Stalin but they did not marry him.
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The ancient city of Samara had been renamed after Kuibyshev on his death in 1935.
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Did Stalin recall Postyshev’s slight cheekiness in 1931? When Stalin wrote to him to complain about the list of those to receive the Order of Lenin: “We give the Order of Lenin to any old shitters.” Postyshev replied cheerfully that the “shitters” were all approved by Stalin himself.
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Khrushchev, like other regional bosses such as Beria and Zhdanov, became the object of an extravagant local cult: a “Song of Khrushchev” soon joined the “Song for Beria” and odes to Yezhov in the Soviet songbook.
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His splendid gravestone in the Novodevichy Cemetery not far from Nadya Stalin’s grave gives no hint of his sinister end.
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He usually signed documents in tiny neat writing in a distinctive turquoise ink or on a turquoise typewriter that did not clash with Stalin’s blue or red crayons.
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The author is grateful to Alyosha Mirtskhulava, Beria’s Georgian Komsomol boss, and later Georgian First Secretary, for his interview in Tbilisi.
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