Stalin: A Biography

and swore that he had had no part in it. His friend Sergo Ordzhonikidze expressed surprise at this religious recidivism; but Stalin exclaimed: ‘She’s a believer! I wish to God that our people believed in Marxism as they do in God!’¹⁵ They had been apart from each other for many years; and even though he had wriggled out of answering her straightforwardly, her question to him showed she knew a gulf of belief would continue to keep them apart. As a Christian Keke had reason to tell her son that the Red Kremlin was no place for her. For her safety and comfort, Stalin moved her into one of the servants’ apartment in the old Viceroy’s palace in Tbilisi. Budu Mdivani commented that the local authorities increased the guard on her: ‘This is so that she doesn’t give birth to another Stalin!’¹⁶

But Joseph did not come back unaccompanied. In Georgia he also sought out his son Yakov by his first wife Ketevan. Yakov had been looked after by Ketevan’s brother Alexander Svanidze and his wife Maria. Joseph hardly knew the thirteen-year-old Yakov but wished to take him at last into his care — or at least into Nadya’s. Nor was this the end of the family’s expansion. The leading Bolshevik F. A. Sergeev, alias Artem, perished in a plane crash in July 1921 leaving a young son. It was the custom in the party for such orphans to be fostered by other Bolsheviks, and this is what the Stalins did. The lad Artem Sergeev lived with them until manhood (and became a major-general in the Red Army in the Second World War).¹⁷ Stalin also interested himself in the upbringing of Nikolai Patolichev, the son of a comrade who reportedly had died in his arms in the Soviet–Polish War of 1920.¹⁸ Young Patolichev was not brought into the family. Nevertheless in the space of a few months the Stalin household had grown in number from two to five.

Nadya brought in domestic assistance while her busy husband focused his energies on politics. She hired a nanny for Vasili; she also employed servants. She herself was like a terrier in getting raw materials for the kitchen. The Kremlin administrative regime, run by Stalin’s old friend Abel Enukidze, assigned a quota of food products for each resident family. Joseph, whose health had troubled him throughout the Civil War, had been recommended a diet with plenty of poultry. As a result he had acquired the monthly right to fifteen chickens, a head of cheese and fifteen pounds of potatoes. By mid-March 1921, days before the new baby was due, the family had already eaten its way through ten of its fifteen chickens. (Either the birds were unusually small and thin or the Stalins had the appetite of horses.) Nadya wrote a request for an increased quota.¹⁹ (Even before she married Joseph she had known how to handle the Soviet bureaucracy: in November 1918, after the Alliluevs moved to Moscow, she wrote to Yakov Sverdlov asking for a better room for them.)²⁰ In later years she made further pleas. One of them was a request for a new kindergarten; she was turned down on that occasion.²¹

Nadya’s wish to work outside the home was conventional among young Bolshevik women, who combined a dedication to the revolutionary cause and to women’s emancipation. She did not object to supervising household management so long as she had servants and could continue to be employed in Lenin’s office. The double role was very heavy and the lack of support from Joseph made it scarcely bearable. He was frequently late in getting back to the Kremlin flat. He was uncouth in manners and had an obscene tongue when irritated. Nor was his language confined to phrases like ‘Go to the Devil!’ Hating to be contradicted, he used the foulest swear-words on his wife. His rough manner was extreme, and it cannot be discounted that he was compensating to some degree for personal insecurities. After hurting his arm as a boy, he had been unable to join in the normal rough-and-tumbles of childhood. He had been rejected on physical grounds by the Imperial Army in the Great War. Stalin wanted to be thought a man’s man. In fact, according to his grand-nephew Vladimir Alliluev, he had carefully manicured nails and ‘almost a woman’s fingers’.²² Did he have some residual doubts about his manliness by contemporary criteria? If he did, it was Nadya who paid the price.

Like most of his male contemporaries, Stalin expected a wife to obey. Here he was disappointed, for Nadya refused to be meek. Disputes between them were frequent more or less from the start of their sustained cohabitation. She too had her moods. Indeed it is now clear that she had mental problems. Perhaps they were hereditary. Schizophrenia of some kind seems to have affected previous generations of her mother’s side of the family; and her brother Fedor, after an acutely traumatic event after the Civil War when the former bank robber Kamo stage-managed a scene in which he threatened to shoot him, had a breakdown from which he never recovered.²³ Nadya had a volatile temperament and, although she remained in love with Joseph, the marriage continued to be rancorous between the patches of tranquillity.

Someone in the central party apparatus decided that Nadya was unsuitable for party membership. The rumour was that it was none other than Joseph. In December 1921 she was excluded from the party: this was a disgrace for anyone working as she did in the offices of Sovnarkom. Eventually she could have lost her job. The charge was that she had not passed the various tests applied to all party members and had not bothered to prepare herself for them. Nor had she helped with mundane party work; this was all the less acceptable inasmuch as she was ‘a person of the intelligentsia’. Only one Central Control Commission member spoke up for her even though Lenin himself had written warmly in her support.²⁴ Nadya begged for another chance and promised to make a greater effort in the way that was demanded. Initially the decision was made to ‘exclude her as ballast, completely uninterested in party work’; but finally the Central Control Commission allowed her to keep the secondary status of a ‘candidate’ party member.²⁵ She could have done without this contretemps in a year full of problems; but at least the eventual decision enabled her to go on working for Lenin’s office without a blemish on her record.

It cannot be proved that Joseph had been behind the move to take away her party card; and Nadya never expressly blamed him. But he belonged to the Politburo and the Orgburo and was already intervening in the Secretariat’s work in 1921:²⁶ he could have put in a good word for her if he had wanted. But she had survived. Stalin accepted the situation and avoided interfering with her professional aspirations again. She functioned as one of Lenin’s secretaries even while Lenin and Stalin were falling out. Krupskaya even asked her to liaise with Kamenev on Lenin’s behalf about the Georgian Affair.²⁷ It would be strange if Nadya kept this a secret from her husband. Perhaps he at last began to see the advantages of having a working wife.

At home Nadya was a severe mother and denied to the children the open affection she directed at Joseph. Strict standards of behaviour were enforced. Yakov, who hardly knew his father before moving to Moscow, reacted badly to this. Joseph’s work kept him away from the apartment and the bond between them never solidified. Such interest as he took in his son tended to involve pressure. He pushed books at him and expected him to read them. ‘Yasha!’ he wrote on the cover of B. Andreev’s The Conquest of Nature, ‘Read this book without fail!’²⁸ But it was Nadya who had to handle Yakov on a daily basis and, as her letter to Joseph’s mother in October 1922 indicated, she found him exasperating:²⁹

I send you a big kiss and pass on greetings from Soso: he’s very healthy, feels very well, works hard, and remembers about you.

Yasha [i.e. Yakov] studies, plays up, smokes and doesn’t listen to me. Vasenka [i.e. Vasili] also plays up, insults his mama and also won’t listen to me. He hasn’t yet started smoking. Joseph will definitely teach him to since he always give him a puff on his papiroska.

A papiroska is a cigarette with an empty tube at the end which acts like a cigarette-holder to allow smoking while wearing gloves in sub-zero temperatures. It was in character for Joseph to expect Nadya to enforce discipline while he himself disrupted it.

Life nevertheless had its pleasant side. The Stalins lived in two places after the Soviet–Polish War: their Kremlin flat and the dacha they called Zubalovo near the old sawmill at Usovo outside Moscow. By a bizarre coincidence, the dacha’s owner had belonged to the Zubalishvili business family which had built the hostel that became the Tiflis Spiritual Seminary. Probably it tickled the fancy of Stalin and his neighbour Mikoyan that they were living in homes put up by an industrialist from the south Caucasus against whom they had once helped to lead strikes.³⁰

Several dachas were made state property in the same district in 1919 and the Stalins occupied Zubalovo-4. Stalin, who had never had a house of his own,³¹ cleared the trees and bushes to turn his patch into a spot to his liking. Near by was the River Moskva, where the children could swim in the summer. It was a beautiful spot which might have appeared in the plays of Anton Chekhov; but whereas Chekhov described how the old rural gentry were supplanted by the nouveaux riches, this was a case of the nouveaux riches being expelled by revolutionaries. While gloating over the Zubalishvilis’ forced departure, Stalin had no inhibition about creating a style of life that was similarly bourgeois. When they