But her heart remained with him and when he returned from Stalingrad they started to see each other again. They kissed and cuddled despite being accompanied by Uncle Klimov. Poor Klimov felt damned if he reported this and damned if he didn’t. On hearing what was happening, Vlasik angrily sent an official to order Kapler out of Moscow. Extraordinarily enough, though, Kapler told him to go to hell.
Stalin at last intervened. ‘I know everything,’ he said to Svetlana. ‘All your telephone conversations, here they are!’ He tapped his pocket, which was full of transcripts. He had never spoken so contemptuously to her. Glaring into her eyes, he shouted: ‘Your Kapler is an English spy; he’s been arrested!’ Svetlana shouted: ‘But I love him!’ Stalin lost his self-control and sneered: ‘You
He could not control absolutely everything and, while a war was going on, did not try. Disappointed in his family, he let his thoughts turn back to Georgia and to his boyhood friends. He had never forgotten them despite years without direct contact. From the thousands of rubles in his unopened pay packets he made a money transfer to Petr Kapanadze, Grigol Glurzhidze and Mikhail Dzeradze. (He was characteristically precise: 40,000 rubles for the first and 30,000 each for the others.) The Supreme Commander signed himself Soso.20
He had gone on seeing old friends and relatives after Nadya’s suicide, but everyone noticed how lonely he was becoming. He welcomed the Alliluevs and Svanidzes to the Blizhnyaya dacha until the late 1930s. The Great Terror changed this. Stalin had Maria Svanidze arrested in 1939 and sent to a labour camp. Her husband Alexander Svanidze also fell victim to the NKVD: he had been arrested in 1937 and was shot in 1941. Alexander behaved with extraordinary courage under torture and refused to confess or beg for mercy. Although Stalin did not yet touch the closest relatives of his deceased second wife, their spouses were not so lucky. Stanislaw Redens, Anna Allilueva’s husband, was arrested in 1938.21 Anna got permission to plead his case along with her parents in the presence of Stalin and Molotov. But on the day of their meeting her father Sergei Alliluev refused to go with them. Stalin took this badly and Redens’s fate was sealed.22 Even those among Stalin’s outer family who escaped incarceration lived in continuous dread of what might happen to them. Yet like everyone in the Kremlin elite, they were moths flying near to the light source; they were incapable of pulling themselves out of their orbits.
During the war there would have been little time for family conviviality even if Stalin had not already ravaged the lives of his relatives. Such hours as he got for relaxation — and they were few — were spent in the company of the commanders and politicians who happened to be at hand. These occasions were predominantly male affairs, and the drink was as lavishly provided as the food. Yet he rationed the evenings he devoted to pleasure. He focused his waking energies on leading the war effort.
That Stalin managed to cope with the intense physical pressures is remarkable. Through the 1930s he had experienced bouts of ill health. His neck artery went on troubling him. His blood circulation was monitored by a succession of doctors; but he distrusted nearly all of them: he had persuaded himself that hot mineral baths were the best cure for any ailments. In 1931 he had a bad throat inflammation just after taking the waters in Matsesta and had a temperature of 39°C. A streptococcal infection followed five years later. His personal physician Vladimir Vinogradov was worried enough to go off and consult other specialists about desirable treatment. Stalin was too sick to join in the New Year celebrations in 1937. Again in February 1940 he was struck down by a raging high temperature and the usual problem with the throat.23 Until 1941, however, he could count on lengthy breaks for recuperation. Usually he had spent several weeks by the Black Sea, giving his body time to recover from the punishing schedule he set himself in Moscow. This was not possible after Operation Barbarossa. Throughout the hostilities, except when he travelled to Yalta and Tehran to confer with the Allied leaders or when he made a much-publicised trip to the proximity of the front,24 Stalin stayed in Moscow or its environs. And he worked himself like a dog.
The strains were manifest. His hair turned grey. (Zhukov unreliably said it was white.)25 His eyes were baggy from insufficient sleep. Excessive smoking aggravated the growing problems of arteriosclerosis. Not that he would have listened to doctors’ advice to change his style of life. Tobacco and alcohol were his consolation, and anyway the medical experts who saw him are not known to have counselled an alteration in the way he lived. They feared to do this — or possibly they did not see much wrong with his behaviour: not every doctor in that period was as severe as their present-day successors. Relentlessly, therefore, Stalin was driving himself to an earlier grave than biological inheritance had prescribed for him.26
Stalin lived an odd life after his wife’s suicide, but others in his entourage had even odder ones. Beria was a rapist of young girls. Others in the Kremlin had a taste for women even though outright physical coercion was not involved. Abel Enukidze, executed in 1937, had been notorious for employing attractive young women whom he took to bed. Kalinin had a penchant for ballerinas, Bulganin for opera divas. Khrush-chev was said to chase women on a regular basis. The sexual history of the Soviet elite included promiscuousness on the part of several leaders, and a few of them had not confined themselves to intercourse with women. Yezhov had been bisexual and found comfort sometimes with both the husband and wife in a marriage. Such individuals were using their political power to secure gratification. As they knew, they could be arrested at any time. Many of them also found relief in drink. Zhdanov and Khrushchev were boozers on a heroic scale. An evening for them was not complete without a skinful of vodka and brandy, and Yezhov had often been drunk by the late morning. Terror brought odd individuals to the apex of the Soviet order and the pressure made them still odder.
It may seem surprising that they managed to function at all as politicians. But this would miss the point. Although they would have engaged in sexual and alcoholic excess even if they had not become Soviet politicians, undoubtedly they were also driven in this direction by the pressures — and dangers — of their jobs.
Stalin’s existence before Operation Barbarossa had been stolid by comparison, but it was not devoid of female companionship or heavy drinking. A plausible piece of gossip was that Stalin took a fancy to his deceased wife Nadya’s sister-in-law Yevgenia. She saw quite a lot of him in the months after the suicide. Another who did so was Maria Svanidze.27 This was not approved by Maria’s husband Alexander, who thought that it might lead to hanky-panky. Maria made no secret of the fact that she ‘loved Joseph and was attached to him’.28 She was good-looking and worked on stage as a singer:29 she could hardly help attracting Stalin’s attention. But it was Yevgenia who was most gossiped about. In fact Yevgenia, whose husband Pavel Alliluev died in 1938, quickly married an inventor called Nikolai Molochnikov. Although it is doubtful that she and Stalin had a sexual relationship, there remains the suspicion that Yevgenia went off with Molochnikov as a way of avoiding becoming more closely involved with Stalin. Her daughter Kira has said opaquely: ‘She got wed so as to defend herself.’30 But filial piety discouraged her from stating whether it was Stalin’s attentions that she wanted to escape. What is known is that Stalin subsequently rang her several times and that during the Second World War he asked her to accompany Svetlana and other relatives as they were evacuated from Moscow. Yevgenia refused his request on the ground that she had her own immediate family to think about.31
Rumours had other candidates as his lovers in the late 1930s; it was even said that he secretly married again. The person said to have been his wife was named as Rosa Kaganovich. This allegation was peddled by the German Nazi media. Supposedly Rosa was Lazar Kaganovich’s beautiful sister. It was a pack of lies. Lazar Kaganovich had only one sister, Rakhil, who died in the mid-1920s.32 Another suggestion was that it was Lazar Kaganovich’s daughter Maya whom Stalin took to bed. Certainly she was good-looking. But there is no credible evidence. Lazar Kaganovich was not a prude and had no reason as a pensioner to pretend that his daughter had had no relationship with Stalin if this was not true.33
What is beyond doubt is the kind of life enjoyed by Stalin among his male friends. He loved to sing with Molotov and Voroshilov accompanied by Zhdanov on the piano. Molotov came from a musical family and could play the violin and mandolin. When he had been in administrative exile in Vologda before the Great War, he had supplemented his convict’s allowance by joining a mandolin group which went round the local restaurants and
