Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar

“Yes—”

“That means you were with them.”

Khrushchev intervened: “The Whites may have been in Orenburg at the time but Comrade Malenkov was not one of them.” It was a time when hesitation could lead to arrest.¹³ Simultaneously, Khrushchev saved his own skin by going to Stalin personally and confessing a spell of Trotskyism during the early twenties.¹⁴

The entourage rabidly encouraged the Terror. Even decades later, these “fanatics” still defended their mass murder: “I bear responsibility for the repression and consider it correct,” said Molotov. “All Politburo members bear responsibility… But 1937 was necessary.” Mikoyan agreed that “everyone who worked with Stalin… bears a share of responsibility.” It was bad enough to kill so many but their complete awareness that many were innocent even by their own arcane standards is the hardest to take: “We’re guilty of going too far,” said Kaganovich. “We all made mistakes… But we won WWII.” ¹⁵ Those who knew these mass murderers later reflected that Malenkov or Khrushchev were “not wicked by nature,” not “what they eventually became.” They were men of their time.¹⁶

In October, another Plenum approved the arrest of yet more members of the Central Committee. “It happened gradually,” said Molotov. “Seventy expelled 1–15 people then sixty expelled another 15.” When a terrified local leader appealed to Stalin “to receive me for just ten minutes on personal matters—I’m accused in a terrible lie,” he scribbled in green to Poskrebyshev: “Say I’m on holiday.” ¹⁷

23. SOCIAL LIFE IN THE TERROR The Wives and Children of the Magnates

Yet all of this tragedy took place in a public atmosphere of jubilation, a never-ending fiesta of triumphs and anniversaries. Here is a scene from the years of the Terror that might have taken place anywhere and any time between a daughter, her best friend and her embarrassing papa. Stalin met his daughter Svetlana in his apartment for dinner daily. At the height of the Terror, Stalin dined with Svetlana, then eleven, and her best friend, Martha Peshkova, whose grandfather, Gorky, and father had both supposedly been murdered by Yagoda, her mother’s lover. Stalin wanted Svetlana to be friends with Martha, introducing them especially. Now the girls were playing in Svetlana’s room when the housekeeper came and told them Stalin was home and at table. Stalin was alone but in a very cheerful mood—he clearly adored coming home to see Svetlana for he would often appear shouting, “Where’s my khozyaika!” and then sit down and help her do her homework. Outsiders were amazed at how this harsh creature “was so gentle with his daughter.” He sat her on his knee and told one visitor: “Since her mother died, I always tell her she’s the khozyaika but she so believed it herself that she tried to give orders in the kitchen but was made to leave immediately. She was in tears but I managed to calm her down.”

That night, he teased Martha, who was very pretty but with a tendency to blush like a beetroot.

“So Marfochka, I hear you are being chased by all the boys?” Martha was so embarrassed she could not swallow her soup or answer. “So many boys are chasing you!” Stalin persisted. Svetlana came to her rescue: “Come on, Papa, leave her alone.” Stalin laughed and agreed, saying he always obeyed his darling khozyaika.

Dinner, recalled Martha, “was miserable for me,” but she was not afraid of Stalin because she had known him since childhood. Yet nothing was quite what it seemed for these children: so many of Svetlana’s parents’ friends had disappeared. Martha had just seen[125] her mother’s new lover arrested.¹

For the children of the leaders who were not arrested, there had never been a time of greater joy and energy. The jazz craze was still sweeping the country: Alexandrov’s latest musical, Volga, Volga, came out in 1938 and its tunes were played over and over again in the dance halls. At parties for the diplomatic corps, the killers danced to the new sounds: Kaganovich hailed jazz as “above all the friend of the jolly, the musical organizer of our high-spirited youth.” Kaganovich wrote a jazz guide leaflet with his friend Leonid Utesov, the jazz millionaire, entitled How to Organize Railway Ensembles of Song and Dance and Jazz Orchestras in which “The Locomotive” commanded that there should be a “dzhaz” band at every Soviet station. They certainly needed cheering up.

“It was truly a time of huge hope and joy for the future,” remembers Stepan Mikoyan. “We were perpetually excited and happy—the new Metro opened with its chandeliers, the giant Moskva Hotel, the new city of Magnitogorsk, and all sorts of other triumphs.” The propaganda machine sung of heroes of labour like the super- miner Stakhanov, of aviation, of exploration. Voroshilov and Yezhov were hailed as “knights” in ballads. The movies had names like Tales of Aviation Heroes. “Yes, it was an age of heroes!” reminisces Andreyev’s daughter Natasha. “We were not afraid then. Life was full—I remember smiling faces and climbing mountains, heroic pilots. Not everyone was living under oppression. We knew as children the first thing to be done was to make people strong, to make a New Man, and educate the people. At school, we learned how to use different tools, we went into the countryside to help with the harvest. No one paid us—it was our duty.”

The NKVD were heroes too: on 21 December, the “Organs” celebrated their twentieth anniversary at a Bolshoi gala. Beneath flowers and banners of Stalin and Yezhov, Mikoyan, in a Party tunic, declared: “Learn the Stalinist style of work from Comrade Yezhov just as he learned it from Comrade Stalin.” But the crux of his speech was: “Every citizen of the USSR should be an NKVD agent.”

The country celebrated the anniversary of Pushkin’s death as well as the anniversary of the Georgian poet Rustaveli which was organized by Beria and attended by Voroshilov and Mikoyan. Stalin was deliberately fusing traditional Russian culture with Bolshevism as Europe lurched closer to war. The Soviets were now fighting the Fascists by proxy in the Spanish Civil War, sparking a craze for Spanish songs and Spanish caps, “blue with red edging on the visor,” and big berets, “tilted at a rakish angle.” Women wore Spanish blouses. “If Tomorrow Brings War” was one of the most popular tunes. All the children of the leaders wanted to be pilots or soldiers.

“Even we children knew that war was coming,” recalls Stalin’s adopted son Artyom, “and we had to be strong not to be destroyed. One day, Uncle Stalin called we boys and said, ‘What would you like to do with your life?’” Artyom wanted to be an engineer. “No, we need men who understand the artillery.” Artyom and Yakov, already an engineer, both joined the artillery. “This was the only privilege I ever received from my Uncle Stalin,” says Artyom. But aviators were the elite: more magnates’ children joined “Stalin’s falcons” than any other service: Vasily trained as a pilot, alongside Stepan Mikoyan and Leonid Khrushchev. ²

Yet the families of the leaders endured a special experience during that time. For the parents, it was a daily torment of depression, uncertainty, exhilaration, anxiety as friends, colleagues and relatives were arrested. Yet to read Western histories and Soviet memoirs, one might believe that this new Bolshevik elite were convinced that all those arrested were innocent. This reflects the postdated guilt of those whose fathers took part in the slaughter.

The truth was different. Zhdanov told his son Yury that Yezhov was right even in the most unlikely cases: “The devil knows! I’ve known him many years but then there was Malinovsky!” he said, referring to the notorious Tsarist spy. Andreyev knew there were Enemies but thought they had to be “thoroughly checked” before they were arrested. Mikoyan had his reservations on many arrests but his son Sergo knew his father was, in his words, a “Communist fanatic.” The wives were if anything more fanatical than the husbands: Mikoyan recalled how his wife utterly believed in Stalin and was least likely to question his actions. “My father,” says Natasha Andreyeva, “believed wreckers and Fifth Columnists were destroying our State and had to be destroyed. My mother was utterly convinced. We prepared for war.”

The magnates never discussed the Terror before the children who lived in a world of lies and murder. The “reluctance to reveal one’s thoughts even to one’s son was the most haunting sign of these times,” remembered Andrei Sakharov the physicist. Yet the children naturally noticed when their uncles and family friends disappeared, leaving unspeakable and unaskable voids in their lives. The Mikoyan children heard their parents and uncles whispering about the arrests in Armenia, but their father sometimes could not stop himself exclaiming, “I don’t believe it!” Andreyev “never mentioned it to us—it was our parents’ business,” recalls Natasha Andreyeva. “But if someone important was arrested, my father would call to Mama, ‘Dorochka, can you speak with me for a minute.’”