Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar

round the table and clinked glasses with Stalin who looked agonized. Anna Redens and Maria Svanidze kissed him on the cheek. Maria thought Stalin was “softer, kinder.” Later, Stalin played the disc jockey, putting his favourite records on the gramophone while everyone danced. Then the Caucasians sang laments with their all-powerful choirboy.

Afterwards, by way of relaxing after the sadness, Vlasik the bodyguard, who doubled as court photographer, assembled the guests for a photograph, a remarkable record of Stalin’s court before the Terror: even this photograph would cause more rows among the competitive women.

Stalin sat in the middle surrounded by his worshipful ladies—on his right sat the pushy Sashiko Svanidze, then Maria Kaganovich and the busty soprano Maria Svanidze, and on his left, the slim, elegant First Lady, Polina Molotova. Uniforms mixed with Party tunics: Voroshilov, always resplendent as the country’s senior officer, Redens in NKVD blue, Pavel Alliluyev in his military Commissar’s uniform. On the floor sat the laughing Caucasians Sergo, Mikoyan and Lakoba while Beria and Poskrebyshev just managed to squeeze in by lying almost flat. But at Stalin’s feet, even more noticeable when he posed again with just the women, sat a Cheshire cat smiling at the camera as if she had got the cream: Zhenya Alliluyeva.¹⁴

13. A SECRET FRIENDSHIP The Rose of Novgorod

You dress so beautifully,” Stalin said admiringly to his sister-in-law Zhenya Alliluyeva. “You should make designing your profession.”

“What! I can’t even sew a button,” retorted the giggling Zhenya. “All my buttons are sewn on by my daughter.”

“So? You should teach Soviet women how to dress!” retorted Stalin.

After Nadya’s death, Zhenya almost moved in to watch over Stalin. In 1934, it seems, this relationship grew into something more. Statuesque and blue-eyed, with wavy blond hair, dimples, an upturned nose and wide, beaming mouth, Zhenya, thirty-six, was a priest’s daughter from Novgorod. She was not beautiful but this “rose of the Novgorod fields,” with golden skin and her quick mischievous nature, radiated health. When she was pregnant with her daughter Kira, she split some logs just before giving birth. While Dora Khazan dressed in austere shifts and Voroshilova got fatter, Zhenya was still young, fresh and completely feminine in her frilly dresses, flamboyant collars and silk scarves.

These women found Stalin all the more appealing because he was so obviously lonely after Nadya’s and now Kirov’s death: “his loneliness is always on one’s mind,” wrote Maria Svanidze. If power itself is the great aphrodisiac, the addition of strength, loneliness and tragedy proved to be a heady cocktail. However, Zhenya was different. She had known Stalin since marrying Nadya’s brother, Pavel, around the time of the Revolution, but they had been abroad a lot and returned from Berlin just before the suicide. Then a fresh relationship developed between Stalin the widower and this funny, blithe woman. The marriage of Pavel and Zhenya had not been easy. Unsuited to military life, Pavel was gentle but hysterical like Nadya. Zhenya grumbled about his weakness. Their marriage had almost ended in the early thirties, when Stalin ordered them to stay together. Despite having given the pistol to Nadya, Pavel often stayed with Stalin.

Stalin admired Zhenya’s joie de vivre. She was unafraid of him: the first time she arrived at Zubalovo after her return from Berlin, she found a meal on the table and ate it all. Stalin then walked in and asked: “Where’s my onion soup?”

Zhenya admitted she had eaten it. This might have provoked an explosion but Stalin merely smiled and said, “Next time, they better make two.”

She said whatever she thought—it was she, among others, who told him about the famine in 1932, yet Stalin forgave her for this. She was well read and Stalin consulted her about what he should read. She suggested an Egyptian history but joked that he “started copying the Pharaohs.” Zhenya made him laugh uproariously with her earthy wit. Their conversation resembled his banter with rough male friends. She was an expert singer of the chastushka, bawdy rhymes with puns that resemble limericks. They do not translate well but Stalin’s favourites were such gems as “Simple to shit off a bridge, but one person did it and fell off” or “Sitting in one’s own shit feels as safe as a fortress.”

Zhenya could not help tactlessly puncturing the balloons of the puffed-up Party women, and Stalin always enjoyed playing off his courtiers. When Polina Molotova, mistress of the perfume industry, boasted to the Leader that she was wearing her latest product, Red Moscow, Stalin sniffed.

“That’s why you smell so nice,” he said.

“Come on, Joseph,” interrupted Zhenya. “She smells of Chanel No. 5!” Afterwards, Zhenya realized she had made a mistake: “Why on earth did I say it?” This made the family enemies among the politicians at a time when politics was about to become a blood sport. Nonetheless she alone could get away with these comments because Stalin “respected her irreverence.”

When Stalin inaugurated the 1936 Constitution, Zhenya, who was late for everything, was late for that too. She crept in and thought no one had noticed until Stalin himself greeted her afterwards.

“How did you spot me?” she asked.

“I see everything, I can see two kilometres away,” replied Stalin whose senses were ferally acute. “You’re the only one who’d dare be late.”

Stalin needed female advice on his children. When Svetlana, maturing early, appeared in her first skirt, Stalin lectured her on “Bolshevik modesty” but asked Zhenya: “Can a girl wear a dress like that? I don’t want her to bare her knees.”

“It’s only natural,” replied Zhenya.

“And she asks for money,” said the father.

“That’s all right, isn’t it?”

“What’s the money for?” he persisted. “A person can live well on ten kopeks!”

“Come on, Joseph!” Zhenya teased him. “That was before the Revolution!”

“I thought you could live on ten kopeks,” murmured Stalin.

“What are they doing? Printing special newspapers for you?” Only Zhenya could say this sort of thing to him.

Stalin and Zhenya probably became lovers at this time. Historians never know what happens behind bedroom doors, and Bolshevik conspiratorial secrecy and prudish morality make these matters especially difficult to research.[78] But Maria Svanidze observed their relationship and recorded it in her diary, which Stalin himself preserved: that summer, Maria spotted how Zhenya went out of her way to be alone with Stalin. The following winter, she records how Stalin arrived back in his apartment to find Maria and Zhenya. He “teased Zhenya about getting plump again. He treated her very affectionately. Now that I know everything I have watched them closely…”

“Stalin was in love with my mother,” asserts Zhenya’s daughter Kira. Daughters perhaps tend to believe great men are in love with their mothers but her cousin Leonid Redens also believes it was “more than a friendship.” There is other evidence too: later in the thirties, Beria approached Zhenya with an offer that sounds like Stalin’s clumsy proposal of marriage. When she remarried after her husband’s death, Stalin reacted with jealous fury.

Stalin himself was always gently courteous with Zhenya. While he barely telephoned Anna Redens or Maria Svanidze, Svetlana remembered how he often phoned her for a chat, even after their relationship was over.

Zhenya was far from the only attractive woman around Stalin. During the mid-thirties, he was still enjoying a normal social life with an entourage that included a cosmopolitan circle of young and flighty women. But for the moment, it was Zhenya who sat at Stalin’s feet.¹

* * *

Just after the party, on 28 and 29 December, the assassin Nikolaev and his fourteen co-defendants were tried by Ulrikh in Leningrad. That reptilian hanging judge called Stalin for orders.

“Finish it,” the Vozhd ordered laconically. Following the 1st December Law, they were shot within an hour—and their innocent families soon after. In the month of December, 6,501 people were