Stalin’s simian
Beauty and the Beast caused much merriment in Stalin’s entourage: Kira Alliluyeva heard “Poskrebyshev’s beautiful Polish wife joke that he was so ugly that she only went to bed with him in the dark.” But Poskrebyshev was proud of his ugliness: Stalin chose him for his hideous countenance. He cheerfully played court jester: Stalin dared Poskrebyshev to drink a glass of vodka in one gulp without a sip of water or to see how long he could hold up his hands with burning paper under each nail.
“Look!” Stalin would laugh, “Sasha can drink a glass of vodka and not even wrinkle his nose!” Stalin liked Bronka, one of a new generation of lighthearted girls, secure in the heart of the elite, where she was accustomed to meet the magnates. She called Stalin the familiar
“Oh yes!”
“Then give it to her!”
Bronka’s best friend was Yevgenia Yezhova, editor and irrepressible literary groupie. These two giggly and flighty glamour pusses of Jewish Polish or Lithuanian origins were so similar that Kira Alliluyeva thought they were sisters. They even shared the same patronymic Solomonova though they were no relation. Yezhov and Poskrebyshev were close friends too—they would go fishing together while their wives gossiped.1
While Blackberry, now promoted to candidate Politburo member, massacred his victims, his wife was friends with all the artistic stars and slept with many of them. The enchanting Isaac Babel was Yezhova’s chief lion: “If you invited people ‘for Babel,’ they all came,” wrote Babel’s wife, Pirozhkova. Solomon Mikhoels, the Yiddish actor who performed
After Nadya’s death, there was a rumour that Stalin fell in love with and married Lazar Kaganovich’s sister, Rosa, his niece (also named Rosa) or his daughter Maya. This was repeated and widely believed: there were even photographs showing Rosa Kaganovich as a dark pretty woman. The Kaganoviches were a good-looking family— Lazar himself was handsome as a young man and his daughter Maya grew up to be compared to Elizabeth Taylor. The significance of the story was that Stalin had a Jewish wife, useful propaganda for the Nazis who had an interest in merging the Jewish and Bolshevik devils into Mr. and Mrs. Stalin. The Kaganoviches, father and daughter, were so emphatic in their denials that they perhaps protested too much but it seems this particular story is a myth.[128]
The story is doubly ironic since the Nazis had no need to invent such a character: Stalin was surrounded by Jewesses—from Polina Molotova and Maria Svanidze to Poskrebysheva and Yezhova. Beria’s son, reliable on gossip, dubious on politics, recalled that his father gleefully listed Stalin’s affairs with Jewesses.3
These pretty young Jewesses fluttered around Stalin but they were all of “dubious origins.” They were more interested in clothes, jokes and affairs than dialectical materialism. Along with Zhenya Alliluyeva and Maria Svanidze, they were surely the life and soul of this fatally interwoven society of Stalin’s family and comrades. Stanislas Redens, chief of the Moscow NKVD, often took his family and the other Alliluyevs over to the Yezhovs. The children were fascinated by the NKVD boss: “Yezhov pranced down the steps in the full dress uniform of Commissar-General in a rather scary way as if he was very full of himself,” recalls Leonid Redens. “He was so sullen while my father was so open.” Kira Alliluyeva enjoyed the frothy banter of Yevgenia Yezhova and Bronka Poskrebysheva. Yezhov, who worked all night, was usually too tired to socialize so Kira and the other teenagers hid behind a curtain. When the minuscule Blackberry strode past in his boots, they started giggling. But their fathers, Pavel Alliluyev and Stanislas Redens, who understood what was at stake, were furious with them—but how could they explain how dangerous a game it was? Now, the promiscuous horseplay of the women around Stalin made them suddenly vulnerable.
In the spring, Stalin began to distance himself from the family, whose gossipy arrogance suddenly seemed suspicious. When they gathered at his apartment for Svetlana’s eleventh birthday on 28 February 1937, Yakov, Stalin’s gentle Georgian son, brought Julia, his Jewish wife, for the first time. She had been married to a Chekist bodyguard when she met Yakov through the Redens, whom Stalin immediately blamed for making a match with “that Jewish woman.” Maria Svanidze, always intriguing, called Julia “an adventuress” and tried to persuade Stalin.
“Joseph, it’s impossible. You must interfere!” This was enough to win Stalin’s sympathy for his son.
“A man loves the woman he loves!” he retorted, whether she was a “princess or a seamstress.” After they married and had their daughter Gulia, Stalin noticed how well Julia kept Yakov’s clothes. She was a
Stalin, losing patience with the family, did not attend the party. Maria Svanidze thought she could understand why: the Alliluyevs were useless: “crazy Olga, idiot Fyodor, imbecilic Pavel and Niura [Anna Redens], narrow- minded Stan [Redens], lazy Vasya [Vasily Stalin], soppy Yasha [Djugashvili]. The only normal people are Alyosha, Zhenya and me and… Svetlana.” This was ironic since it was the Svanidzes who were the first to fall. Maria herself was ebulliently egotistical, tormenting her own husband with letters that boasted, “I’m better looking than 70% of Bolshevik wives… Anyone who meets me remembers forever.” This was true but far from helpful at Stalin’s court. One pities these haughty, decent women who found themselves in the quagmire of this place and time which they so little understood. 4
That spring, Stalin and Pavel played Svanidze and Redens at billiards. The losers traditionally had to crawl under the table as their penalty. When Stalin’s side lost, Pavel diplomatically suggested that the children, Kira and Sergei, should crawl under the table for them. Sergei did not mind—he was only nine—but Kira, who was eighteen, refused defiantly. As outspoken as her mother and fearless with it, she insisted that Stalin and her father had lost and under the table they should go. Pavel became hysterical and clipped her with the billiard cue.
Soon afterwards, Stalin and the blue-eyed, dandyish Svanidze suddenly ceased to be “like brothers.” “Alyosha was quite a liberal, a European,” explained Molotov. “Stalin sensed this…” Svanidze was Deputy Chairman of the State Bank, an institution filled with urbane cosmopolitans now under grave suspicion. On 2 April 1937, Stalin wrote an ominous note to Yezhov: “Purge the staff of the State Bank.” Svanidze had also done secret and sensitive work for Stalin over the years. Maria Svanidze’s diary stopped in the middle of the year: her access to Stalin had suddenly ended. By 21 December, they were under investigation and not invited for Stalin’s birthday which must have been agony for Maria. Days later, the Svanidzes visited Zhenya and Pavel Alliluyev in the House on the Embankment (where they all lived). Maria showed off her low-cut velvet dress. After they left at midnight, Zhenya and Kira were doing the dishes when the bell rang. It was Maria’s son from her first marriage: “Mama and Alyosha have been arrested. She was taken away in her beautiful clothes.” A few months later, Zhenya received a letter from Maria who begged her to pass it on to Stalin: “If I don’t leave this camp, I’ll die.” She took the letter to Stalin who warned her: “Don’t ever do this again!”
Maria was moved to a harsher prison. Zhenya sensed the danger for her and her children of being so close to Stalin, although she adored him until the end of her days, despite her terrible misfortunes. She drew back from Stalin while nagging Pavel to speak to him about their arrested friends. Apparently he did so: “They’re my friends— so put me in jail too!” Some were released.
The other Alliluyevs also did their bit: grandmother Olga, living a
