credentials, dreary articles on dialectical materialism. It was so important that Molotov and Polina even discussed Marxism in their love letters: “Polichka my darling… reading Marxist classics is very necessary… You must read some more of Lenin’s works coming out soon and then a number of Stalin’s… I so want to see you.”
“Party-mindedness” was “an almost mystical concept,” explained Kopelev. “The indispensable prerequisites were iron discipline and faithful observance of all the rituals of Party life.” As one veteran Communist put it, a Bolshevik was not someone who believed merely in Marxism but “someone who had absolute faith in the Party no matter what… A person with the ability to adapt his morality and conscience in such a way that he can unreservedly accept the dogma that the Party is never wrong—even though it’s wrong all the time.” Stalin did not exaggerate when he boasted: “We Bolsheviks are people of a special cut.”2
Nadya was not of “a special cut.” The famine fed the tensions in Stalin’s marriage. When little Kira Alliluyeva visited her uncle Redens, GPU chief in Kharkov, she opened the blinds of her special train and saw, to her amazement, starving people with swollen bellies, begging to the train for food, and starving dogs running alongside. Kira told her mother, Zhenya, who fearlessly informed Stalin.
“Don’t pay any attention,” he replied. “She’s a child and makes things up.” [42] In the last year of Stalin’s marriage, we find fragments of both happiness and misery. In February 1932, it was Svetlana’s birthday: she starred in a play for her parents and the Politburo. The two boys, Vasya and Artyom, recited verses.3
“Things here seem to be all right, we’re all very well. The children are growing up, Vasya is ten now and Svetlana five… She and her father are great friends…” Nadya wrote to Stalin’s mother Keke in Tiflis. It was hardly an occasion to confide great secrets but the tone is interesting. “Altogether we have terribly little free time, Joseph and I. You’ve probably heard that I’ve gone back to school in my old age. I don’t find studying difficult in itself. But it’s pretty difficult trying to fit it in with my duties at home in the course of the day. Still, I’m not complaining and so far, I’m coping with it all quite successfully…” She was finding it hard to cope.
Stalin’s own nerves were strained to the limit but he remained jealous of her: he felt old friends Yenukidze and Bukharin were undermining him with Nadya. Bukharin visited Zubalovo, strolling the gardens with her. Stalin was working but returned and crept up on them in the garden, leaping out to shout at Bukharin: “I’ll kill you!” Bukharin naively regarded this as an Asiatic joke.
When Bukharin married a teenage beauty, Anna Larina, another child of a Bolshevik family, Stalin tipsily telephoned him during the night: “Nikolai, I congratulate you. You outspit me this time too!” Bukharin asked how. “A good wife, a beautiful wife… younger than my Nadya!”4
At home, Stalin alternated between absentee bully and hectored husband. Nadya had in the past snitched on dissenters at the Academy: in these last months, it is hard to tell if she was denouncing Enemies or riling Stalin who ordered their arrest. There is the story of this “peppery woman” shouting at him: “You’re a tormentor, that’s what you are! You torment your own son, your wife, the whole Russian people.” When Stalin discussed the importance of the Party above family, Yenukidze replied: “What about your children?” Stalin shouted, “They’re HERS!” pointing at Nadya, who ran out crying.
Nadya was becoming ever more hysterical, or as Molotov put it, “unbalanced.” Sergo’s daughter Eteri, who had every reason to hate Stalin, explains, “Stalin didn’t treat her well but she, like all the Alliluyevs, was very unstable.” She seemed to become estranged from the children and everything else. Stalin confided in Khrushchev that he sometimes locked himself in the bathroom, while she beat on the door, shouting: “You’re an impossible man. It’s impossible to live with you!”
This image of Stalin as the powerless henpecked husband besieged, cowering in his own bathroom by the wild-eyed Nadya, must rank as the most incongruous vision of the Man of Steel in his entire career. Himself frantic, with his mission in jeopardy, Stalin was baffled by Nadya’s mania. She told a friend that “everything bored her—she was sick of everything.”
“What about the children?” asked the friend.
“Everything, even the children.” This gives some idea of the difficulties Stalin faced. Nadya’s state of mind sounds more like a psychological illness than despair caused by political protest or even her oafish husband. “She had attacks of melancholy,” Zhenya told Stalin; she was “sick.” The doctors prescribed “caffeine” to pep her up. Stalin later blamed the caffeine and he was right: caffeine would have disastrously exacerbated her despair.5
Stalin became hysterical himself, feeling the vast Ukrainian steppes slipping out of his control: “It seems that in some regions of Ukraine, Soviet power has ceased to exist,” Stalin scribbled to Kosior, Politburo member and Ukrainian boss. “Is this true? Is the situation so bad in Ukrainian villages? What’s the GPU doing? Maybe you’ll check this problem and take measures.”6 The magnates again roamed the heartland to raise grain, more ferocious semi-military expeditions with OGPU troops and Party officials wearing pistols—Molotov headed to the Urals, the Lower Volga and Siberia. While he was there, the wheels of his car became stuck in a muddy rut and the car rolled over into a ditch. No one was hurt but Molotov claimed, “An attempt was made on my life.”7
Stalin sensed the doubts of the local bosses, making him more aware than ever that he needed a new, tougher breed of lieutenant like Beria whom he promoted to rule the Caucasus. Summoning the Georgian bosses to Moscow, Stalin turned viciously against the Old Bolshevik “chieftains”: “I’ve got the impression that there’s no Party organization in Transcaucasia at all. There’s just the rule of chieftains—voting for whomsoever they drink wine with… It’s a total joke… We need to promote men who work honestly… Whenever we send anyone down there, they become chieftains too!” He was playing to the gallery. Everyone laughed, but then he turned serious: “We’ll smash all their bones if this rule of chieftains isn’t liquidated…”
Sergo was away.
“Where is he?” whispered one of the officials to Mikoyan who answered: “Why should Sergo participate in Beria’s coronation? He knows him well enough.”
There was open opposition to the promotion of Beria: the local chiefs had almost managed to have him removed to a provincial backwater but Stalin had saved him. Then Stalin defined the essence of Beria’s career: “He solves problems while the Buro just pushes paper!”[43]
“It’s not going to work, Comrade Stalin. We can’t work together,” replied one Georgian.
“I can’t work with that charlatan!” said another.
“We’ll settle this question the routine way,” Stalin angrily ended the meeting, appointing Beria Georgian First Secretary and Second Secretary of Transcaucasia over their heads. Beria had arrived. 8
In Ukraine, Fred Beal wandered through villages where no one was left alive and found heartbreaking messages scrawled beside the bodies: “God bless those who enter here, may they never suffer as we have,” wrote one. Another read: “My son. We couldn’t wait. God be with you.”
Kaganovich, patrolling the Ukraine, was unmoved. He was more outraged by the sissy leaders there: “Hello dear Valerian,” he wrote warmly to Kuibyshev, “We’re working a lot on the question of grain preparation… We had to criticize the regions a lot, especially Ukraine. Their mood, particularly that of Chubar, is very bad… I reprimanded the regions.” But in the midst of this wasteland of death, Kaganovich was not going to spoil anyone’s holidays: “How are you feeling? Where are you planning to go for vacation? Don’t think I’m going to call you back before finishing your holidays…”9
After a final meeting with Kaganovich and Sergo in his office on 29 May 1932, Stalin and Nadya left for Sochi. Lakoba and Beria visited them but the latter now had his access to Stalin. He ditched his patron, Lakoba, who muttered in Beria’s hearing, “What a vile person.” 10
We do not know how Stalin and Nadya got on during this holiday but, day by day, the pressure ratcheted up. Stalin governed a country on the edge of rebellion by correspondence, receiving the bad news in heaps of GPU reports—and the doubts of his friends.[44] While Kaganovich suppressed the rebellious textile workers of Ivanovo, Voroshilov was unhappy and sent Stalin a remarkable letter: “Across the Stavropol region, I saw all the fields uncultivated. We were expecting a good harvest but didn’t get it… Across the Ukraine from my train window, the truth is it looks even less cultivated than the North Caucasus…” Voroshilov finished his note: “Sorry to tell you such things during your holiday but I can’t be silent.”11
Stalin later told Churchill this was the most difficult time of his life, harder even than Hitler’s invasion: “it was
