could, the entire Stalin family went out to Zubalovo. They gathered honey. They searched for mushrooms and wild strawberries. Joseph took pot-shots at pheasants and rabbits and the family ate what he killed. The Stalins kept open house and visitors stayed as long as they wanted. Budenny and Voroshilov often popped over to drink and sing with Joseph. Ordzhonikidze and Bukharin were others who spent time there. Gentle-mannered Bukharin was a particular favourite with Nadya and the children: he even brought a tame grey fox with him and did a painting of the trees by the dacha.32
In the summers they holidayed in the south of the USSR, usually in one of the many state dachas by the Black Sea. Stalin had material couriered to him whenever he needed to be consulted. But he knew how to enjoy himself. There were always plenty of Caucasian dishes and wines on his table and the visitors were many. Georgian and Abkhazian politicians queued to ingratiate themselves. His Moscow cronies, if they were staying in nearby dachas, called on the family; and picnics were arranged in the hills or by the seaside. Although Stalin could not swim, he loved the fresh air and the beach as well.
He also used the vacations as a time to allow his body to recuperate. Joseph’s health had always troubled him and since 1917 he had resorted to various traditional cures. The rheumatism in his arm and his bothersome cough — probably caused by his pipe-smoking — figured often in his letters.33 Once he had stopped at Nalchik high up in the north Caucasus. It was a place visited by tuberculosis patients.34 But Stalin’s specific complaints were different; and for his rheumatism, which affected his arm every spring, he was advised by Mikoyan to try the hot baths at Matsesta near Sochi on the Black Sea coast.35 Stalin tried this and found the waters at Matsesta to work ‘a lot better than the Essentuki muds’.36 Essentuki was one of the spa towns of the north Caucasus famous for the medical benefits of its soil. Stalin mostly, in any case, preferred to go to Sochi for his summer vacations.37 From 1926 he put himself in the hands of Dr Ivan Valedinski, a great believer in ‘balneology’. When Stalin made his way south in the summer, he pocketed instructions from Valedinski: he was told to take a dozen baths at Matsesta before returning home. Stalin asked for permission to enliven his stay with a glass or two of brandy at weekends. Valedinski was stern: Stalin could take a glass on Saturdays but definitely not on Sundays.38
Perhaps the doctor forgot that Sundays were not sacred for an atheist. In any case Stalin was never a trusting patient; he had his own pack of medicines and used them as he saw fit regardless of advice from doctors.39 It is doubtful that he went along with everything that Valedinski specified. But undoubtedly he felt better than earlier. The hot baths eased the pain in his joints and the aspirin prescribed by Valedinski reduced the pain in his neck. A heart check-up in 1927 confirmed him as generally robust.40
More worrisome to Stalin than his recurrent ill health were his growing difficulties with Nadya. Periods of calm and tenderness were interrupted by explosions of mutual irritation. Nadya and the children spent time with him in the south; and she and Joseph wrote to each other if for some reason she could not stay there.41 Her absence became normal once she started a student’s course at the Industrial Academy: the beginning of term coincided with her husband’s annual holiday leave. Their letters to each other were tender. He called her Tatka and she called him Joseph. She was solicitous about him: ‘I very much beg you to look after yourself. I kiss you deeply, deeply, as you kissed me when we said goodbye.’42 She also wrote to his mother on Joseph’s behalf, giving news of the children and passing on little details about life in Moscow. Stalin himself wrote to Georgia only infrequently. He was too preoccupied with political business, and anyway he had hardly bothered about his blood relatives for many years. Usually his letters to his mother were brief to the point of curtness and ended with a phrase such as ‘Live a thousand years!’43 Nadya was doing her best for him, but she could never get the appreciation and understanding from her husband that she craved.
His harshness would have demoralised the most optimistic spirit. Nadya’s mental condition worsened and she was given to episodes of despair. Stalin’s flirtations with other women probably played a part in this. On the secretarial staff of the Politburo was a beautiful young woman, Tamara Khazanova, who befriended Nadya; she came round to the Kremlin flat and helped with the children. At some point it would seem that Stalin took a fancy to her and pursued his interest.44
Nadya descended into gloom. She expressed her thoughts in a letter to her friend Maria Svanidze, the sister of Joseph’s first wife:45
You write that you’re bored. You know, dearest, that it’s the same everywhere. I have absolutely nothing to do with anyone in Moscow. Sometimes it seems strange after so many years to have no close friends, but this obviously depends on one’s character. Moreover, it’s strange that I feel myself closer to non-members of the party (women, of course). The obvious explanation is that such people are simpler.
I greatly regret tying myself down again in new family matters. In our day this isn’t very easy because generally a lot of the new prejudices are strange and if you don’t work, then you’re looked upon as an ‘old woman’.
‘New family matters’ was Nadya’s odd way of referring to her latest pregnancy. Because of this she had to delay getting the requisite qualifications for professional employment. Enrolment on some training course remained her ambition. She told Maria to take the same attitude or else spend her time running errands for others.46
The child she was expecting was born on 28 February 1926; it was a girl, and they named her Svetlana. Nadya, however, remained determined to free herself of domesticity and in autumn 1929 she got herself enrolled at the Industrial Academy in central Moscow on a course specialising in artificial fibres. The Stalin household was left to servants and nannies.
Each morning she left the Kremlin and made for the Industrial Academy. She left behind all privilege. She was also leaving a middle-aged environment and joining people of her own age. Most of the students were unaware that Nadya Allilueva was the wife of the Party General Secretary — and even if they knew this, they did not act much differently towards her. Off set Nadya without chauffeur or bodyguard, taking the same forms of transport as her fellow students. She wrote to Joseph about a very tedious journey on 12 September 1929:47
Today I can say that things are better since I had an exam in written maths which went well but in general everything is not so successful. To be precise, I had to be at the I[ndustrial] A[cademy] by nine o’clock and of course I left home at 8.30, and what happens but the tram has broken down. I started to wait for a bus, but there wasn’t one and so I decided to take a taxi so as not to be late. I got into it and, blow me, we’d only gone 100 yards and the taxi came to a halt; something in it as well had gone bust.
While claiming to find this catalogue of service breakdowns funny she pleaded a bit too hard for this to convince. Nadya had high standards in everything and was annoyed by the deterioration in conditions. She was making sure that Joseph learned something about the kind of life facing ordinary metropolitan inhabitants: the noise, mess and disorder.48
Even Joseph sometimes encountered such unpleasantness for himself. On one occasion in the late 1920s he and Molotov were walking outside the Kremlin on some business or other. Molotov never forgot what ensued:49
I remember a heavy storm; the snow was piling up and Stalin and I were walking across the Manege. We had no bodyguard. Stalin was wearing a fur coat, long boots and a hat with ear-flaps. No one knew who he was. Suddenly a beggar stuck to us: ‘Give us some money, good sirs!’ Stalin reached into his pocket, pulled out a ten- ruble note and handed it to him, and we walked on. The beggar, though, yelled after us: ‘Ah, you damned bourgeois!’ This made Stalin laugh: ‘Just try and understand our people. If you give them a little, it’s bad; if you give them a lot, it’s also bad!’
But generally he was insulated from experiences of this kind.
What worried Nadya, though, was that he had cut himself off from a sustained family commitment. He was bad-tempered and domineering at home. She suspected him of having flings with attractive women who came his way. And he otherwise seldom thought of anything but politics. He felt fulfilled not in their Kremlin flat or at Zubalovo but in his office a few hundred yards across Red Square on Old Square. This was where the Central Committee was situated from 1923. He had his office on an upper floor near Molotov, Kaganovich and
