that Nadya had died of the effects of appendicitis. Wives of the most prominent leaders signed a letter of condolence to Stalin. This too was published in the newspaper. A funeral commission was selected, headed by Abel Enukidze. There was to be a cortege behind a horse-drawn carriage carrying her coffin. The mourners would gather on Red Square at three o’clock in the afternoon on 12 November and would walk across the city to the Novodevichi Monastery Cemetery. Such occasions were cause for official concern, and the OGPU was put in charge of the organisation and security of the proceedings. Orchestras were to be supplied by the OGPU and the Red Army. A short ceremony was to take place at the graveside. There would be two speakers: Kaganovich as Moscow City Committee Party Secretary and Kalashnikov, a representative from the Industrial Academy where she had been studying.21 Stalin left the details to others. His public appearance on the day of the funeral was going to be an ordeal, and he did not volunteer to give a eulogy before the coffin was interred.
Despite what many subsequently suggested, he attended the ceremony. The cortege of mourners made its way on foot through the city. It was a day without snow. Crowds lined the streets. At the cemetery the open coffin was taken from the carriage and lowered into the hard earth. Kaganovich’s oration briefly mentioned the deceased and ended with a request that communist party members should carry out the duties falling to them as a consequence of Stalin’s personal loss. Kalashnikov gave a eulogy to Nadya as a fine and dedicated student.22 The funeral was over within minutes. Stalin and his comrades returned by limousine to the Kremlin. A simple tombstone was erected over Nadya’s grave, where it remains to this day.
When the Industrial Academy approached Stalin for permission to examine her working materials, he immediately consented and asked Anna Allilueva, Nadya’s sister, to expedite this. Not for Stalin the usual possessiveness of the widower. He told Anna to inspect the safe with the assistance of Tamara Khazanova.23 Nadya’s daughter Svetlana was to claim that a suicide note was left behind; but Svetlana learned only many years later that her mother had died by her own hand, and her memoirs are anyway not always reliable. It anyway can hardly be assumed that such a note would necessarily explain everything. What is clear is that the official clampdown on information in 1932 served only to feed the growth of rumours. In diplomatic circles it was bruited that she had committed suicide.24 Gossip was intense within the walls of the Kremlin. This was dangerous activity. Alexandra Korchagina, the maid of Joseph and Nadya, was denounced by other Kremlin domestic staff for saying that Stalin had killed her; she was sentenced to three years’ corrective labour on the White Sea–Baltic Canal. Korchagina claimed that it was her own denouncers who had made such a statement about Stalin.25 The denouncers themselves were arrested in the 1935 clear-out of Kremlin auxiliary staff.26
Indisputably Stalin was deeply shaken. ‘I was a bad husband,’ he admitted to Molotov: ‘I never had time to take her to the cinema.’27 This was hardly a full recognition of the scale of assistance he would have needed to give Nadya. But it signalled a degree of remorse. Significantly it also implied that circumstances, rather than his own demeanour, determined his contribution to the tragedy. He was also thinking as much about himself as about his deceased wife. His self-centredness grew. Within a few weeks he was blaming her directly and worrying about the fate of their children. The attempt on his own life by young Yakov Dzhughashvili came back to mind, and at a dinner with his friends he blurted out: ‘How could Nadya, who so much condemned Yasha for such a step, go off and shoot herself? She did a very bad thing: she made a cripple out of me.’ Alexander Svanidze, his brother-in-law by his first marriage, tried to mollify him by asking how she could leave her two children motherless. Stalin was angry: ‘Why the children? They forgot her within a few days: it’s me she made a cripple for life!’ But then he proposed: ‘Let’s drink to Nadya!’28
Steadily he came to take a less charitable view of Nadya’s suicide:29
The children grew up without their mother, that was the trouble. Nannies, governesses — however ideal they might have been — could not replace their mother for them. Ah, Nadya, Nadya, what did you do and how much I and the children needed you!
He focused his thoughts on the harm done to the children and, above all, to himself. Sinking into introspection, he confided in no one. He told the children that their mother had died of natural causes. Tough and icy though he was in outward behaviour, Stalin’s inner mood was touchy.
For some weeks there were worries that he too might do away with himself. He was pale and inattentive to his daily needs. His characteristic earthy sense of humour disappeared. It was weeks before he started to pull himself around. Seeking companionship, he turned to his Politburo associates. Kirov was a particular chum. Whenever Kirov was on a trip from Leningrad, he went to see the Ordzhonikidzes; but frequently Stalin called him over to his place and Kirov slept there overnight.30 Mikoyan was also frequently invited. This caused embarrassment for Mikoyan, whose wife Ashken was not easily persuaded that he really was staying where he said. Soon Mikoyan had to start declining Stalin’s requests, and Stalin turned to Alexander Svanidze.31 He sorely needed the reassurance and company of familiar individuals. The Soviet Union’s ruler was a lonely widower. According to Lazar Kaganovich, he was never the same man again. He turned in on himself and hardened his attitude to people in general.32 He drank and ate more, sometimes sitting at the table for three or four hours after putting in a full day in his office.33
Yet he did not yet take things out on the family and friends of his late wife. (That came later.) The Alliluevs tried to stay in touch with him without presuming too much upon his time and convenience. Nadya’s father Sergei wrote to him to ask whether he might still go and stay at the Zubalovo dacha. He was in poor health and hoped to convalesce in the countryside.34 The request, written two months after Nadya’s death, tugged Stalin out of his self-absorption. Indeed it exasperated him: ‘Sergei! You’re a strange person! What sort of “permission” do you need when you have the full right to come and reside in “Zubalovo” without any “permission”!’35 He welcomed other members of the Alliluev family, and Yevgenia — Nadya’s sister-in-law — made efforts to see that he had a social life. The Svanidzes too popped by to see him whenever they could. Blood ran thicker than water both for Stalin and them.
Yet Zubalovo offered reminders of his married years. Another dacha outside Moscow seemed a sensible idea, and Stalin discovered an architect with ideas he found congenial. Miron Merzhanov designed country houses with thick, gloomy walls as if they were intended to stand as impregnable fortresses. Without Nadya to dissuade him, Stalin commissioned a residence serving better as a work place than as a family home. A rural spot was found near Kuntsevo, west of Moscow. It was only seven miles from the Kremlin and could be reached within minutes by official limousine. Stalin got the dacha he wanted. There was a large hall for meetings as well as several bedrooms and rooms for afternoon tea, billiards and film-shows. The construction was complete by 1934; Stalin quickly set himself up there and ceased to sleep in the Kremlin flat. The dacha became known as Blizhnyaya (‘Nearby Dacha’). Another was built further out and called Dalnyaya (‘Distant Dacha’), but Blizhnyaya was his favourite. Merzhanov had to be patient with his patron. No sooner had Blizhnyaya gone up than Stalin demanded alterations, even to the extent of requiring a second storey to be added.36 He was forever thinking of ways to make the little rural castle into his dream.
His was a restless and unhappy spirit. Although he lived by choice apart from his family, he was not comfortable with being on his own; and Moscow, where he had spent most years of his second marriage, was never going to allow him to forget the past. He looked forward keenly to his vacations in the south. Although he and Nadya had holidayed there together, her student obligations had latterly kept her in Moscow. State dachas already existed along the coast between Sochi and Sukhum, and Merzhanov was kept busy with commissions to design new ones.
Nearly all Stalin’s vacations after 1932 took place in Abkhazia. Although he lived alone in the various local dachas, he spent his time convivially. The wine flowed and his tables groaned with food. His boon companion was Nestor Lakoba. In the factional disputes of the 1920s Lakoba had kept the Communist Party of Georgia clear of oppositionist influence. He had fought in the Civil War and was a crack shot with a hunting rifle; it amused Stalin that Lakoba put the Red Army commanders to shame when they went out hunting in the mountains.37 Lakoba, moreover, had been an orphan and — like Stalin — had had a difficult childhood; and he too had studied at the Tiflis Spiritual Academy.38 He was a bluff Caucasian who saw to it that Stalin was given the leisure to enjoy the delights of the Caucasus: the scenery, the wildlife, the wines and the cuisine. Even when Stalin stayed in Sochi, over the Abkhazian border in the RSFSR, Lakoba would come to visit. In 1936 when Lakoba got into political trouble with higher party authority in the Transcaucasian Federation and was stripped of the right to leave Sukhum without permission, Stalin was furious. Whatever might be the local
