reassurance.15
After Sochi, Stalin and Nadya took the waters at Tsaltubo. Stalin wrote to Sergo from Tsaltubo to tell him about his new plan for their joint protege. He joked that he had seen the regional bosses, calling one “a very comical figure” and another “now too fat.” He concluded, “They agreed to bring Beria into the Kraikom [regional committee] of Georgia.” Sergo and the Georgian bosses were appalled at a policeman lording it over old revolutionaries. Yet Stalin happily signed off to Sergo, “Greetings from Nadya! How’s Zina?”16
Taking the waters was an annual pilgrimage. In 1923, Mikoyan found Stalin suffering from rheumatism with his arm bandaged and suggested that he take the waters in the Matsesta Baths near Sochi. Mikoyan even chose the merchant’s house with three bedrooms and a salon in which Stalin stayed. It was a mark of the close relationship between the two men. 17 Stalin often took Artyom with him “in an old open Rolls-Royce made in 1911.” Only his personal bodyguard Vlasik accompanied them.[36]
Stalin seems to have been shy physically, either because of his arm or his psoriasis: among the leaders, only Kirov went to the baths with him. But he did not mind Artyom. As they soaked in the steam, Stalin told Artyom “stories about his childhood and adventures in the Caucasus, and discussed our health.”
Stalin was obsessed with his own health and that of his comrades. They were “responsible workers” for the people, so the preservation of their health was a matter of State. This was already a Soviet tradition: Lenin supervised his leaders’ health. By the early thirties, Stalin’s Politburo worked so hard and under such pressure that it was not surprising that their health, already undermined by Tsarist exile and Civil War, was seriously compromised. Their letters read like the minutes of a hypochondriacs’ convention. [37]
“Now I’m getting healthy,” Stalin confided in Molotov. “The waters here near Sochi are very good and work against sclerosis, neurosis, sciatica, gout and rheumatism. Shouldn’t you send your wife here?” 18 Stalin suffered the tolls of the poor diet and icy winters of his exiles: his tonsillitis flared up when he was stressed. He so liked the Matsesta specialist, Professor Valedinsky, that he often invited him to drink cognac on the veranda with his children, the novelist Maxim Gorky, and the Politburo. Later he moved Valedinsky to Moscow and the professor remained his personal physician until the war.
His dental problems might themselves have caused his aches. After his dentist Shapiro had worked heroically, at Nadya’s insistence, on eight of his rotten and yellowed teeth, Stalin was grateful: “Do you wish to ask me anything?” The dentist asked a favour. “The dentist Shapiro who works a lot on our responsible workers asks me (now he’s working on me) to place his daughter in the medical department of Moscow University,” Stalin wrote to Poskrebyshev. “I think we must render such help to this man for the service he does daily for our comrades. So could you do this and fix it… very quickly… because we risk running out of time… I’m awaiting your answer.” If he could not get the daughter into Moscow, then Poskrebyshev must try Leningrad.19
Stalin liked to share his health with his friends: “At Sochi, I arrived with pleurisy (dry),” he told Sergo. “Now I feel well. I have taken a course of ten therapeutic baths. I’ve had no more complications with rheumatism.”20 They told theirs too.21
“How’s your nephritic stone?” Stalin asked Sergo, who was holidaying with Kaganovich. The letters formed a hypochondriacal triangle.
“Kaganovich and I couldn’t come, we’re sitting on a big steamboat,” replied Sergo, telling “Soso,” “Kaganovich’s a bit ill. The cause isn’t clear yet. Maybe his heart is so-so… Doctors say the water and special baths will help him but he needs a month here… I feel good but not yet rested…”
Kaganovich sent a note too, from the Borzhomi Baths: “Dear Comrade Stalin, I send you a steamy hello… It’s a pity the storm means you can’t visit us.”22 Sergo also told Stalin about Kaganovich’s health: “Kaganovich has swollen legs. The cause isn’t yet established but it’s possible his heart is beating too faintly. His holiday ends on 30th August but it’ll be necessary to prolong it…”23 Even those in Moscow sent medical reports to Stalin on holiday: “Rudzutak’s ill and Sergo has microbes of TB and we’re sending him to Germany,” Molotov reported to his leader. “If we got more sleep, we’d make less mistakes.” 24
Term was starting so Nadya headed back to Moscow. Stalin returned to Sochi whence he sent her affectionate notes: “We played bowling and skittles. Molotov has already visited us twice but as for his wife, she’s gone off somewhere.” Sergo and Kalinin arrived but “there’s nothing new. Let Vasya and Svetlana write to me.”
Unlike the year before, Stalin and Nadya had got on well during the holidays, to judge by their letters. Despite Beria, her tone was confident and cheerful. Nadya wanted to report to her husband on the situation in Moscow. Far from being anti-Party, she remained as eager as ever to pass her exams and become a qualified manager: she worked hard on her textile designs with Dora Khazan.
“Moscow’s better,” she wrote, “but like a woman powdering to cover her blemishes, especially when it runs and runs in streaks.” Kaganovich’s remodelling of Moscow was already shaking the city, such was his explosive energy. The destruction of the Christ the Saviour, the ugly nineteenth-century cathedral, to make way for a much more hideous Palace of the Soviets, was progressing slowly. Nadya began to report “details” that she thought Stalin needed to know but she saw them from a very feminine aesthetic: “The Kremlin’s clean but its garage-yard’s very ugly… Prices in the shops are very high and stocks very high. Don’t be angry that I’m so detailed but I’d like the people to be relieved of all these problems and it would be good for all workers…” Then she turned back to Stalin himself: “Please rest well…” Yet the tensions in government could not be concealed from Nadya: indeed she was living at the heart of them, in the tiny world of the Kremlin where the other leaders visited her every day: “Sergo called me—he was disappointed by your blaming letter. He looked very tired.”25
Stalin was not angry about the “details.” “It’s good. Moscow changes for the better.”26 He asked her to call Sergei Kirov, the Leningrad boss, of whom he was especially fond: “He decided to come to you on 12th September,” she told him, asking a few days later, “Did Kirov visit you?” Kirov soon arrived in Sochi where his house was one of those down in the valley beneath Stalin’s. They played the games that perhaps reflected Stalin’s spell as a weatherman: “With Kirov, we tested the temperature in the valley where he lives and up where I live— there’s a difference of two degrees.”[38] Stalin was no swimmer, probably because of his bad arm though he told Artyom it was because “mountain people don’t swim.” But now he went swimming with Kirov.
“Good that Kirov visited you,” she wrote back, sweetly, to her husband who had once saved her life in the water. “You must be careful swimming.” Later he had a special paddling pool built inside the house at Sochi, to precisely his height, so he could cool off in private.
Meanwhile the famine was gaining momentum: Voroshilov wrote to Stalin, encouraging the despatch of leaders into the regions to see what was happening.
“You’re right,” Stalin agreed on 24 September 1931. “We don’t always understand the meaning of personal trips and personal acquaintance of people with affairs. We’d win a lot more often if we travelled more and got to know people. I didn’t want to go on holiday but… was very tired and my health’s improving…” He was not the only one on holiday while discussing the famine: Budyonny reported starvation but concluded, “The building on my new country house is finished, it’s very pretty…”27
“It’s raining endlessly in Moscow,” Nadya informed Stalin. “The children have already had flu. I protect myself by wrapping up warmly.” Then she teased him playfully about a defector’s book about Lenin and Stalin. “I read the White journals. There’s interesting material about you. Are you curious? I asked Dvinsky [Poskrebyshev’s deputy] to find it… Sergo phoned and complained about his pneumonia…”
There was a fearsome storm in Sochi: “The gale howled for two days with the fury of an enraged beast,” wrote Stalin. “Eighteen large oaks uprooted in the grounds of our dacha…” He was happy to receive the children’s letters. “Kiss them from me, they’re good children.”
Svetlana’s note to her “First Secretary” commanded: “Hello
6. TRAINS FULL OF CORPSES
