15. THE TSAR RIDES THE METRO
A mid the Yenukidze Case, Stalin, Kaganovich and Sergo attended the birthday party of Svetlana’s beloved nanny at his apartment. “Joseph has bought a hat and wool stockings” for the nanny. He cheerfully and lovingly fed Svetlana from his own plate. Everyone was filled with excitement and optimism because the great Moscow underground, named the Kaganovich Metro, a magnificent Soviet showpiece with marble halls like palaces, had just opened. Its creator Kaganovich had brought ten tickets for Svetlana, her aunts and the bodyguards to ride the Metro. Suddenly Stalin, encouraged by Zhenya and Maria, decided he would go too.
This change of plan provoked a “commotion” among Stalin’s courtiers which is hilariously described in Maria’s diary. They became so nervous at this unplanned excursion that even the Premier was telephoned; almost half the ruling Politburo was involved within minutes. All were already sitting in their limousines when Molotov scurried across the courtyard to inform Stalin that “such a trip might be dangerous without preparation.” Kaganovich, “the most worried of all, went pale” and suggested they go at midnight when the Metro was closed but Stalin insisted. Three limousines of magnates, ladies, children and guards sped out of the Kremlin to the station, dismounted and descended into Kaganovich’s tunnels. Once they arrived on the platform, there was no train. One can only imagine Kaganovich’s frantic efforts to find one fast. The public noticed Stalin and shouted compliments. Stalin became impatient. When a train finally arrived, the party climbed aboard to cheers.
They got out at Okhotny Ryad to inspect the station. Stalin was mobbed by his fans and Maria almost crushed against a pillar but the NKVD finally caught up with them. Vasily was frightened, Maria noticed, but Stalin was jovial. There was then a thoroughly Russian mix-up as Stalin decided to go home, changed his mind and got out at the Arbat where there was another near-riot before they all got back to the Kremlin. Vasily was so upset by the whole experience that he cried on his bed and had to be given valerian drops.1
The trip marked another decline in relations between the leaders and the Svanidze and Alliluyev ladies, those un-Bolshevik actresses, all “powder and lipstick” in Maria’s words. Kaganovich was furious with the women for persuading Stalin to travel on the Metro without any warning: he hissed at them that he would have arranged the trip if only they had given him some notice. Only Sergo would have shaken his head at this ludicrous scene. Dora Khazan, working her way up the Light Industry Commissariat, thought they were “trivial women who did nothing, frivolous time wasters.” The family began to feel that “we were just poor relations,” said Kira Alliluyeva. “That’s how they made us feel. Even Poskrebyshev looked down on us as if we were in the way.” As for Beria, the family, with fatal misjudgement, made no bones of their dislike of him. The women interfered and gossiped in a way that Nadya never had. But in the stern Bolshevik world, and especially given Stalin’s views of family, they went too far. Maria, who had sneaked to Stalin about Yenukidze’s amours, boasted to her diary, “They even say I’m stronger than the Politburo because I can overturn its decrees.”
Worse, the women pursued vendettas against each other: The photograph of the 1934 birthday party now caused another row that undermined Stalin’s trust. When Sashiko Svanidze stayed with him at Kuntsevo, she found the photograph on Stalin’s desk and borrowed it in order to print up some copies, the sort of pushy behaviour often found in ambitious women at imperial courts, suggesting that these ladies regularly read the papers on Stalin’s desk. Maria, who loathed Sashiko’s brazen climbing, discovered this, warning Stalin: “You can’t let her make a shop out of your house and start trading on your kind-heartedness.” It was a rare occasion indeed when Stalin was criticized for his big-heartedness.
He became irritated, blaming his secretaries and Vlasik for losing the photographs. Eventually he said Sashiko could “go to Hell” but his fury applied equally to all the family: “I know she did wonderful things for me and other Old Bolsheviks… but nonetheless, she always takes offence, writes letters to me at the drop of a hat, and demands my attention. I have no time to look after myself and I couldn’t even look after my own wife…” Nadya was constantly on his mind at this time.
Sashiko was dropped, to Zhenya and Maria’s delight, yet they themselves took liberties. The Svanidzes still acted as if Joseph was their kind-hearted paterfamilias, not the Great Stalin. When Stalin invited the Svanidzes and Alliluyevs to join him for dinner after watching the Kirov Ballet, “we badly miscalculated the time and did not arrive until almost midnight when the ballet ended at ten. Joseph does not like to wait.” This understates the case: it is hard to imagine anyone forgetting the time and leaving an American president waiting for two hours. Here we see Stalin through the eyes of his friends before the Terror turned him into a latter-day Ivan the Terrible: we find him “stood up” by his dinner dates for two hours, left at Kuntsevo to play billiards with the bodyguards! Stalin, his sense of historic and sacerdotal mission despoiled, must have reflected on the disrespect of these Soviet aristocrats: they were not remotely afraid of him.
When they arrived, the men went off to play billiards with the disgruntled Stalin who was distinctly unfriendly to the women. But after the wine, he shone with pride about Svetlana, recounting her charming sayings like any father. Nonetheless they would pay for their tardiness.2
Stalin had loved his unscheduled Metro ride, telling Maria how moved he was “by the love of the people for their leader. Here nothing was prepared and fixed. As he said…the people need a Tsar, whom they can worship and for whom they can live and work.”3 He had always believed the “Russian people are Tsarist.” At various times, he compared himself to Peter the Great, Alexander I and Nicholas I but this child of Georgia, a Persian satrapy for centuries, also identified with the Shahs. He named two monarchs as his “teachers” in his own notes: one was Nadir Shah, the eighteenth-century Persian empire builder of whom he wrote: “Nadir Khan. Teacher.” (He was also interested in another Shah, Abbas, who beheaded a father’s two sons and sent him their heads: “Am I like the Shah?” he asked Beria.)
But he regarded Ivan the Terrible as his true alter ego, his “teacher,”[85] something he revealed constantly to comrades such as Molotov, Zhdanov and Mikoyan, applauding the Tsar’s necessary murder of over-mighty
Now, in late 1935, he also began to reproduce some of the trappings of Tsardom: in September, he restored the title Marshal of the Soviet Union (though not Field Marshal), promoting Voroshilov, Budyonny and three other heroes of the Civil War: Tukhachevsky whom he hated; Alexander Yegorov, the new Chief of Staff, whose wife had so upset Nadya on the night of her suicide; and the legendary Vasily Blyukher. For the NKVD, he created a rank equivalent to Marshal, promoting Yagoda to Commissar-General of State Security. Sartorial splendour suddenly mattered again: Voroshilov and Yagoda gloried in their uniforms. When Stalin sent Bukharin on a trip to Paris, he told him, “Your suit is threadbare. You can’t travel like that… Things are different with us now; you have to be well dressed.” Such was Stalin’s eye for detail that the tailor from the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs called that afternoon.
More than that, the NKVD had access to the latest luxuries, money and houses. “Permit me 60,000 gold roubles to buy cars for our NKVD workers,” wrote Yagoda in a pink pen to Molotov on 15 June 1935. Interestingly Stalin (in blue) and Molotov (in red) signed it but reduced it to 40,000. But that was still a lot of Cadillacs. Stalin had already ordered that the Rolls-Royces in the Kremlin be concentrated in the “special garage.” 5
Stalin had become a Tsar: children now chanted, “Thank you, Comrade Stalin, for our happy childhood,” perhaps because he now restored Christmas trees. But unlike the bejewelled Romanovs, identified so closely with the old Russian village and peasantry, Stalin created his own special kind of Tsar, modest, austere, mysterious and urban. There was no contradiction with his Marxism.6
Sometimes Stalin’s loving care for his people was slightly absurd. In November 1935, for example, Mikoyan announced to the Stakhanovites in the Kremlin that Stalin was taking great interest in soap. He had demanded samples, “after which we received a special Central Committee decree on the assortment and composition of soap,” he declared to cheers. Then Stalin moved from soap to lavatories. Khrushchev ran Moscow with Mayor Nikolai Bulganin, another rising star, a handsome but ruthless blond ex-Chekist with a goatee beard: Stalin nicknamed them the “city fathers.” Now he summoned Khrushchev: “Talk it over with Bulganin and do something… People hunt
