Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar

and I want them to succeed in German.” She often enclosed Svetlana’s childish notes.⁸ They shared their health worries like any couple. When Stalin was taking the cure at the Matsesta Baths near Sochi, he reported to her: “I’ve had two baths and I will have ten… I think we’ll be seriously better.”

“How’s your health?” she inquired.

“Had an echo on my lungs and a cough,” he replied. His teeth were a perennial problem: “Your teeth—please have them treated,” she told him. When she took a cure in Carlsbad, he asked caringly: “Did you visit the doctors —write their opinions!” He missed her but if the treatment took longer, he understood.⁹

Stalin did not like changing his clothes and wore summer suits into winter so she always worried about him: “I send you a greatcoat because after the south, you might get a cold.”¹⁰ He sent her presents too: “I’m sending you some lemons,” he wrote proudly. “You’ll like them.” This keen gardener was to enjoy growing lemons until his death.¹¹

They gossiped about the friends and comrades they saw: “I heard Gorky [the famous novelist] came to Sochi,” she wrote. “Maybe he’s visiting you—what a pity without me. He’s so charming to listen to…”¹² And of course, as a Bolshevik handmaiden living in that minuscule wider family of magnates and their wives, she was almost as obsessed about politics as he was, passing on what Molotov or Voroshilov told her.¹³ She sent him books and he thanked her but grumbled when one was missing. She teased him about his appearances in White emigre literature.

The austerely modest Nadya was not afraid of giving orders herself. She scolded her husband’s saturnine chef de cabinet Poskrebyshev while on holiday, complaining that “we didn’t receive any new foreign literature. But they say there are some new ones. Maybe you will talk to Yagoda [Deputy GPU boss]… Last time we received such uninteresting books…” ¹⁴ When she returned from the vacation, she sent Stalin the photographs: “Only the good ones—doesn’t Molotov look funny?” He later teased the absurdly stolid Molotov in front of Churchill and Roosevelt. He sent her back his own holiday photographs.¹⁵

However, by the late twenties, Nadya was professionally discontented. She wanted to be a serious Bolshevik career woman in her own right. In the early twenties, she had done typing for her husband, then Lenin and then for Sergo Ordzhonikidze, another energetic and passionate Georgian dynamo now responsible for Heavy Industry. Then she moved to the International Agrarian Institute in the Department of Agitation and Propaganda where, lost in the archives, we find the daily work of Stalin’s wife in all its Bolshevik dreariness: her boss asks his ordinary assistant, who signs herself “N. Alliluyeva,” to arrange the publication of a shockingly tedious article entitled “We Must Study the Youth Movement in the Village.”

“I have absolutely nothing to do with anyone in Moscow,” she grumbled. “It’s strange, though I feel closer to non-Party people—women of course. The reason is they’re more easygoing… There are a terrible lot of new prejudices. If you don’t work, you’re just a baba!”[2] She was right. The new Bolshevik women such as Polina Molotova were politicians in their own right. These feminists scorned housewives and typists like Nadya. But Stalin did not want such a wife for himself: his Nadya would be what he called a “baba.”¹⁶ In 1929, Nadya decided to become a powerful Party woman in her own right and did not go on holiday with her husband but remained in Moscow for her examinations to enter the Industrial Academy to study synthetic fibres, hence her loving correspondence with Stalin. Education was one of the great Bolshevik achievements and there were millions like her. Stalin really wanted a baba but he supported her enterprise: ironically, his instincts may have been right, because it became clear that she was really not strong enough to be a student, mother and Stalin’s wife simultaneously. He often signed off: “How are the exams? Kiss my Tatka!” Molotov’s wife became a People’s Commissar—and there was every reason for Nadya to hope she would do the same.¹⁷

Across the Kremlin, the magnates and their wives converged on Voroshilov’s apartment, oblivious of the tragedy about to befall Stalin and Nadya. None of them had far to come. Ever since Lenin had moved the capital to Moscow in 1918, the leaders had lived in this isolated secret world, behind walls thirteen feet thick, crenellated burgundy battlements and towering fortified gates, which, more than anything, resembled a 64-acre theme park of the history of old Muscovy. “Here Ivan the Terrible used to walk,” Stalin told visitors. He daily passed the Archangel Cathedral where Ivan the Terrible lay buried, the Ivan the Great Tower, and the Yellow Palace, where he worked, had been built for Catherine the Great: by 1932, Stalin had lived fourteen years in the Kremlin, as long as he had in his parental home.

These potentates—the “responsible workers” in Bolshevik terminology—and their staff, the “service workers,” lived in high-ceilinged, roomy apartments once occupied by Tsarist governors and majordomos, mainly in the Poteshny[3] or Horse Guards, existing so closely in these spired and domed courtyards that they resembled dons living in an Oxford college: Stalin was always popping in to their homes and the other leaders regularly turned up at his place for a chat, almost to borrow the proverbial cup of sugar.

Most of the guests only needed to walk along the corridor to get to the second-floor apartment of Kliment Voroshilov and his wife Ekaterina in the Horse Guards (nominally the Red Guards Building, but no one called it that). Their home was reached through a door in the archway that contained the little cinema where Stalin and his friends often decamped after dinner. Inside, it was cosy but spacious, with dark wood-panelled rooms looking out over the Kremlin walls into the city. Voroshilov, their host, aged fifty-two, was the most popular hero in the Bolshevik pantheon—a genial and swaggering cavalryman, once a lathe turner, with an elegant, almost d’Artagnanish moustache, fair hair and a cherubic rosy-cheeked face. Stalin would have arrived with the priggish Molotov and the debauched Kuibyshev. Molotov’s wife, the dark and formidable Polina, always finely dressed, came from her own flat in the same building. Nadya crossed the lane from the Poteshny with her sister Anna.

In 1932, there would have been no shortage of food and drink, but these were the days before Stalin’s dinners became imperial banquets. The food—Russian hors d’oeuvres, soup, various dishes of salted fish and maybe some lamb—was cooked in the Kremlin canteen and brought hot up to the flat, where it was served by a housekeeper and washed down with vodka and Georgian wine in a parade of toasts. Faced with unparalleled disaster in the regions where ten million people were starving, conspiracy in his Party, uncertain of the loyalty of his own entourage—and with the added strain of a troubled wife, Stalin felt beleaguered and at war. Like the others at the centre of this whirlwind, he needed to drink and unwind. Stalin sat in the middle of the table, never at the head, and Nadya sat opposite him.

During the week, the Stalin household was based in the Kremlin apartment. The Stalins had two children, Vasily, eleven, a diminutive, stubborn and nervous boy, and Svetlana, seven, a freckly red-haired girl. Then there was Yakov, now twenty-five, son of Stalin’s first marriage, who had joined his father in 1921, having been brought up in Georgia, a shy, dark boy with handsome eyes. Stalin found Yakov irritatingly slow. When he was eighteen, he had fallen in love with, and married, Zoya, a priest’s daughter. Stalin did not approve, because he wanted Yasha to study. In a “cry for help,” Yasha shot himself but only grazed his chest. Stalin regarded this “as blackmail.” The stern Nadya disapproved of Yasha’s self-indulgence: “she was so appalled by Yasha,” Stalin mused. But he was even less sympathetic.

“Couldn’t even shoot straight,” he quipped cruelly. “This was his military humour,” explains Svetlana. Yasha later divorced Zoya, and came home.¹⁸

Stalin had high and, given his own meteoric success, unfair expectations of the sons—but he adored his daughter. In addition to these three, there was Artyom Sergeev, Stalin’s beloved adopted son, who was often in their house, even though his mother was still alive.[4] Stalin was more indulgent than Nadya, even though he smacked Vasily “a couple of times.” Indeed, this woman portrayed as angelic in every history was, in her way, even more self-centred than Stalin. Her own family regarded her as “utterly self- indulgent,” recalls her nephew Vladimir Redens. “The nanny complained that Nadya was not remotely interested in the children.” Her daughter Svetlana agreed that she was much more committed to her studies. She treated the children sternly and never gave Svetlana a “word of praise.” It is surprising that she rowed most with Stalin not about his evil policies but about his spoiling the children!

Yet it is harsh to blame her for this. Her medical report, preserved by Stalin in his archive, and the testimonies of those who knew her, confirm that Nadya suffered from a serious mental illness, perhaps hereditary manic depression or borderline personality disorder though her daughter called it “schizophrenia,” and a disease of the skull that gave her migraines. She needed special rest cures in 1922 and 1923 as she experienced “drowsiness and weakness.” She had had an abortion in 1926 which, her daughter revealed, had caused “female problems.” Afterwards she had no periods for months on end. In 1927, doctors discovered her heart had a defective valve—and she suffered from exhaustion, angina and arthritis. In 1930, the angina struck again. Her tonsils had recently been