that he himself had unleashed. It was unforgivably clumsy to send Beria, whom Zhenya loathed, on this sensitive mission but that is typical of Stalin. If one has any doubt about this analysis, Stalin’s reaction to Zhenya’s next move may confirm it.
Zhenya was alarmed, fearing that Beria would frame her for trying to poison Stalin. She swiftly married an old friend, named N. V. Molochnikov, a Jewish engineer whom she had met in Germany, perhaps the lover who had almost broken up her marriage. Stalin was appalled, claiming that it was indecent so soon after Pavel’s death. Beria’s proposal puts Stalin’s hurt in a slightly different light. Beria fanned the flames by suggesting that perhaps Zhenya had poisoned her husband, an idea with resonance in this poisoners’ coven. Some say the body was dug up twice for tests. In spite of the poisoning allegations, Stalin retained his fascination with Zhenya, going out of his way just before the war to quiz her daughter Kira: “How’s your mother?” Zhenya and Anna Redens were banned from the Kremlin and Stalin looked elsewhere for his “housekeeper.”7
A young maid named Valentina Vasilevna Istomina had worked at Zubalovo since her late teens in the early thirties. In 1938, she came to work at Kuntsevo. Stalin was attracted to a specific ideal: the busty, blue-eyed, big- haired and retrousse-nosed Russian peasant woman, submissive and practical, a
These
This was probably the pattern of his trivial dalliances but what happened at Kuntsevo is beyond our knowledge. Everyone who knew Stalin insists that he was no womanizer and he was famously inhibited about his body. We know nothing about his sexual tastes but Nadya’s letters suggest they had a passionate relationship. A fascinating glimpse into his relations with women—perhaps connected to his views on sex—is provided by his attitude to dancing. He liked making Russian dance steps and kicks on his own but dancing
Stalin warned his son Vasily against “women with ideas,” whom he found uncomfortable: “we’ve known that kind, herrings with ideas, skin and bones.” He was most at home with the women of the service staff. The maids, cooks and guards at his houses were all employed by Vlasik’s department and all signed confidentiality contracts though these were hardly necessary in this kingdom of fear. Even when the USSR collapsed, very few of them ever spoke.[143] The Kremlin hairdresser, who so upset Nadya, was one of these and so was his maid Valentina Istomina, known as Valechka, who gradually became the mainstay of Stalin’s home life.
“She laughed all the time and we really liked her,” said Svetlana, “she was very young, with pink cheeks and she was liked by everyone. She was a pleasant figure, typically Russian.” She was Stalin’s “ideal” woman, buxom and neat, “round-faced and pug-nosed,” primitive, simple and unlettered; she “served at table deftly, never joined in the conversation,” yet she was always there when she was needed. “She had light brown mousy hair—I remember her well from about 1936, nothing special, not fat not thin but very friendly and smiling,” says Artyom Sergeev. Out of Stalin’s presence, she was fun in an unthreatening way, even shrewd: “She was a clever one, talkative, a chatterbox,” recalled one of Stalin’s bodyguards.
Valechka was promoted to housekeeper, taking care of Stalin’s “clothes, the food, the house and so on and she travelled with him wherever he went. She was a comfortable soul to be quiet with, yet he trusted her and she was devoted to him.” Stalin was farcically proud of the way she prepared his underwear: after the war, one Georgian official was amazed when he showed off the piles of gleaming white smalls in his wardrobe, surely a unique moment in the history of dictators.
At the Kremlin apartment, Valechka often served Svetlana and her friend Martha who recalls her “in her white apron, like a kind woman from the villages, with her fair hair and shapeless figure, not fat though. Always smiling. Svetlana loved her too.” Artyom was one of the few who heard how Stalin spoke to her: “he’d say about her birthday or something, ‘Of course I must give you a present.’”
“I don’t need anything, Comrade Stalin,” she replied.
“Well, if I forget, remind me.” At the end of the thirties, Valechka became Stalin’s trusted companion and effectively his secret wife, in a culture when most Bolshevik couples were not formally married. “Valya looked after Father’s creature comforts,” Svetlana said. The court understood that she was his companion and no more was said about it. “Whether or not Istomina was Stalin’s wife is nobody’s business,” said the ageing Molotov. “Engels lived with his housekeeper.” Budyonny and Kalinin “married” their housekeepers.
“My father said she was very close to him,” asserts Nadezhda Vlasika. Kaganovich’s daughter-in-law heard from “Iron Lazar”: “I only know that Stalin had one common-law wife. Valechka, his waitress. She loved him.”[144]
Valechka appeared like a jolly, quiet and buxom hospital sister, always wearing a white apron at Stalin’s dinners. No one noticed when she attended Yalta and Potsdam: this was as Stalin wished it. Henceforth Stalin’s private life was frozen in about 1939: the dramas of Nadya and Zhenya that had caused him pain and anger were over. “These matters,” recalled the Polish Communist Jakob Berman, who was often at Kuntsevo during the forties, “were arranged with extreme discretion and never filtered out beyond his closest circle. Stalin was always very careful there shouldn’t be any gossip about him… Stalin understood the danger of gossip.” If other men could be betrayed by their wives, there at least he was safe. He sometimes asked Valechka’s political opinions as an ordinary person. Nonetheless, for this political man, she was no companion. He remained lonely.9
Between 24 February and 16 March 1939, Beria presided over the executions of 413 important prisoners, including Marshal Yegorov and ex-Politburo members Kosior, Postyshev and Chubar: he was already living in the dacha of the last of these. Now he suggested to Stalin that they call a halt, or there would be no one left to arrest. Poskrebyshev marked up the old Central Committee with VN—Enemy of the People—and the date of execution. The next day, Stalin reflected to Malenkov: “I think we’re well and truly rid of the opposition millstone. We need new forces, new people…” The message was sent down the
Blaming all excesses on Yezhov, Stalin protected his other grotesques. The “denunciatrix” of Kiev, Nikolaenko, was discredited. But she once again appealed to Stalin and Khrushchev: “I ask you to check everything, where I was mistaken, where I was lied to and where I was provoked, I’m ready to be punished,” she wrote to Khrushchev. But then, still playing high politics, she warned Stalin: “I’m sure there are too many remnants of Enemies in Kiev… Dear Joseph Vissarionovich, I’ve no words to tell you how to understand me but you understand us, your people, without words. I write to you with bitter tears.” Stalin protected her: “Comrade Khrushchev, I ask you to take measures to let Nikolaenko find calm and fruitful work, J.St.”
The victims of his creatures could now appeal to Stalin. Khrulev, who was to be the outstanding Red Army quartermaster during the Second World War, complained to Stalin about the peripatetic, pompous Mekhlis. “The lion is the king of the jungle,” Stalin laughed.
“Yes but Mekhlis’s a dangerous animal,” said Khrulev, “who told me he’d do all he could… [to destroy
