Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar

Messalina but none of her guile. She had first married an official, Khayutin, then Gadun, who was posted to the Soviet Embassy in London. She went too but when he was sent home, she stayed abroad, typing in the Berlin legation. It was there that she met her first literary star, Isaac Babel, whom she seduced with the line of so many flirtatious groupies meeting their heroes: “You don’t know me but I know you well.” These words later assumed a dreadful significance.

Back in Moscow, she met “Kolya” Yezhov.¹² Yevgenia yearned to hold a literary salon: henceforth Babel and the jazz star Leonid Utsesov were often chez Yezhov. It was she who asked the Mandelstams: “Pilniak comes to see us. Whom do you go to see?” But Yezhov was also obsessionally devoted to Stalin’s work—writers did not interest him. The only magnate who was a friend of both Yezhovs was Sergo, as was his wife Zina: photographs show the two couples at their dachas. Sergo’s daughter Eteri remembers how Yevgenia “was much better dressed than the other Bolshevik wives.” ¹³

By 1934, Yezhov was once again so weary that he almost collapsed, covered in boils. Stalin, on holiday with Kirov and Zhdanov, despatched Yezhov to enjoy the most luxurious medical care available in Mitteleuropa and ordered Poskrebyshev’s deputy, Dvinsky, to send the Berlin Embassy this coded note: “I ask you to pay very close attention to Yezhov. He’s seriously ill and I cannot estimate the gravity of the situation. Give him help and cherish him with care… He is a good man and a very precious worker. I will be grateful if you will inform the Central Committee regularly[83] on his treatment.”¹⁴

No one objected to Yezhov’s rise. On the contrary, Khrushchev thought him an admirable appointment. Bukharin respected his “good heart and clean conscience” though he noticed that he grovelled before Stalin—but that was hardly unique.¹⁵ “Blackberry” worked uneasily with Yagoda to force Zinoviev, Kamenev and their unfortunate allies to confess to being responsible for the murder of Kirov and all manner of other dastardly deeds.¹⁶

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It was not long before Blackberry’s chain-mail fist reached out to crush one of Stalin’s oldest friends: Abel Yenukidze. That genial sybarite and seigneur of the Bolshoi flaunted his sexual affairs with ever younger girls, including teenage ballerinas. Girls filled his office, which came to resemble a sort of Bolshevik dating agency for future and cast-off mistresses.

Stalin’s circle was already abuzz with his antics: “Being dissolute and sensual,” Yenukidze left a “stench everywhere indulging himself to procure women, breaking up families, seducing girls,” wrote Maria Svanidze. “Having all the goodies of life in his hands… he used this for his own filthy personal purposes, buying girls and women.” She claimed Yenukidze was “sexually abnormal,” picking up younger and younger girls, sinking to children of nine to eleven years old. The mothers were paid off. Maria complained to Stalin who surely began to listen: Stalin had not trusted him as early as 1929.

Nadya’s godfather crossed the line between family and politics in Stalin’s life and this proved a dangerous fence to straddle. A generous friend to Left and Right, he may have objected to the 1st December Law but he also personified the decadence of the new nobility. Abel was not the only one: Stalin felt himself surrounded by pigs at the trough. Stalin was always alone even among his convivial entourage, convinced of his separateness and often lonely. As recently as 1933, he had begged Yenukidze to holiday with him. In Moscow, Stalin often asked Mikoyan and Alyosha Svanidze, who was like “a brother” to him, to stay overnight. Mikoyan stayed a few times but his wife was unhappy about it: “How could she check whether I was really at Stalin’s?” Svanidze stayed more often.¹⁷

The catalyst for Yenukidze’s fall was Stalin’s favourite subject: personal history for the Bolsheviks was what genealogy was for the medieval knights. When his book The Secret Bolshevik Printing Presses was published, it was eagerly sent to Stalin by his weasel-faced Pravda editor, Mekhlis, with a note that “some parts are… marked.” Stalin’s marginalia in his copy show his almost Blimpish irritation: “That’s false!”, “fibs” and “balderdash!” When Yenukidze wrote an article about his activities in Baku, Stalin distributed it to the Politburo peppered with “Ha-ha-ha!” Yenukidze made a grievous mistake in not lying about Stalin’s heroic exploits. This was understandable because the outstanding part in the creation of the Baku movement had been played by himself.

“What more does he want?” Yenukidze complained. “I am doing everything he has asked me to do but it is not enough for him. He wants me to admit he is a genius.”¹⁸

Others were not so proud. In 1934, Lakoba published a sycophantic history of Stalin’s heroic role in Batumi. Not to be outdone, Beria mobilized an array of historians to falsify his On the History of the Bolshevik Organizations in the Transcaucasus which was published later in the year under his own name.

“To my dear, adored master,” Beria inscribed his book, “to the Great Stalin!”¹⁹

* * *

Now Nadya’s death caught up with Yenukidze: a terrorist cell was “uncovered” by Yezhov in the Kremlin, which Abel ran. Kaganovich raged, Shakespearean style, “There was something rotten there.” The NKVD arrested 110 of Yenukidze’s employees, librarians and maids, for terrorism. Stalinist plots always featured a wicked beauty: sure enough, there was a “Countess,” said to have poisoned book pages to kill Stalin. Two were sentenced to death and the rest from five to ten years in the camps. Like everything that happened around Stalin, this “Kremlin Case” had various angles: it was partly aimed at Yenukidze, partly at clearing the Kremlin of possibly disloyal elements, but it was also somehow connected to Nadya. A maid, whose appeal to President Kalinin is in the archives, was arrested for gossiping with her friends about Nadya’s suicide. Stalin had surely not forgotten that Yenukidze had “swayed” Nadya politically, and been the first to see the body.

Yenukidze was sacked, made to publish a “Correction of Errors,” demoted to run a Caucasian sanatorium and viciously attacked by Yezhov (and Beria) at a Plenum. Blackberry first raised the stakes: Zinoviev and Kamenev were not just morally responsible for Kirov’s murder—they planned it. Then he turned to poor “Uncle Abel” whom he accused of political blindness and criminal complacency in letting the “counter- revolutionary Zinoviev-Kamenev and Trotskyite terrorists” feather their nests inside the Kremlin while plotting to kill Stalin. “This nearly cost Comrade Stalin his life,” he alleged. Yenukidze was “the most typical representative of the corrupt and self-complacent Communists, playing the ‘liberal’ gentleman at the expense of the Party and State.” Yenukidze defended himself by blaming Yagoda: “No one was hired for work without security clearance!”

“Not true!” retorted Yagoda.

“Yes it is!… I—more than anyone else—can find a host of blunders. These may be indignantly characterized—as treason and duplicity.”

“Just the same,” intervened Beria, attacking Yenukidze for his generous habit of helping fallen comrades, “why did you give out loans and assistance?”

“Just a minute…” answered Yenukidze, citing an old friend who had been in the opposition, “I knew his present and past better than Beria.”

“We knew his present situation as well as you do.”

“I didn’t help him personally.”

“He’s an active Trotskyite,” retorted Beria.

“Deported by the Soviet authorities,” intervened Stalin himself.

“You acted wrongly,” Mikoyan added.

Yenukidze admitted giving another oppositionist some money because his wife appealed to him.

“So what if she starves to death,” said Sergo, “so what if she croaks, what does it have to do with you?”

“What are you? Some kind of child?” Voroshilov called out. The attacks on Yenukidze’s lax security were also attacks on Yagoda: “I admit my guilt,” he confessed, “in that I did not… seize Yenukidze by the throat…”

On the question of how to punish Yenukidze, there was disagreement: “I must admit,” Kaganovich said, “that not everyone found his bearings in this matter… but Comrade Stalin at once smelled a rat…” The rat was finally expelled from the Central Committee and the Party (temporarily).²⁰

Days afterwards, at Kuntsevo, a grumpy Stalin suddenly smiled at Maria Svanidze: “Are you pleased Abel’s been punished?” Maria was delighted at his overdue cleansing of the suppurating wound of depravity. On May Day, Zhenya and the Svanidzes joined Stalin and Kaganovich for kebabs, onions and sauce but the Vozhd was tense until the women started bickering. Then they toasted Nadya: “She crippled me,” reflected Stalin. “After condemning Yasha for shooting himself, how could Nadya kill herself ?”²¹