There’s no one, absolutely no one to have a heart-to-heart conversation with, damn you. Can’t you somehow make it over here to Cracow?”
Yet Stalin did make a new friend in Cracow: Malinovsky. The convicted rapist and Okhrana traitor, two years older than Stalin, was now enjoying a lavish Okhrana salary of 8,000 roubles per annum—more than the director of Imperial Police, who got only 7,000.
“He was lively, resourceful, handsome,” remembered Molotov, “and he looked a bit like Tito.” Henceforth Stalin wrote to him warmly, sending love to “Stefania and the kids.” Malinovsky slyly denounced other Bolsheviks as traitors to distract attention from himself, but the pressure of a double life was beginning to drive him to breakdown.
At the last meeting on New Year’s Eve 1912, Stalin caved in to Lenin.
Afterwards, Lenin and the Bolsheviks went out to the theatre to celebrate the New Year, “but the play was very bad,” recalls Olga Veiland. “Vladimir Illich walked out with his wife.” Lenin, Stalin and the others saw in the New Year 1913 in a private room at a restaurant. When she was an old lady, Veiland confided that Stalin had started to become flirtatious. “Lenin seemed very cheerful, joking and laughing. He started singing and even joined in the games we were playing.”{212}
Soon afterwards, Stalin arrived at the apartment of the Troyanovskys in a frozen Vienna, shrouded in snow. Lenin called them “good people… They have money!” Alexander Troyanovsky was a handsome young nobleman and army officer: his service in the Russo-Japanese War had converted him to Marxism and now he edited and funded
The antique, bewhiskered Habsburg Kaiser, who had reigned since 1848, travelled in a gilded carriage drawn by eight white horses, manned by postilions decked out in black-and-white-trimmed uniforms and white perukes, escorted by Hungarian horsemen with yellow-and-black panther furs over their shoulders. Stalin would not have been able to miss this vision of obsolescent magnificence—and he was not the only future dictator to see it: the cast of twentieth-century titans in Vienna that January 1913 belongs in a Tom Stoppard play.[138] In a men’s dosshouse on Meldemannstrasse, in Brigettenau, another world from Stalin’s somewhat grander address, lived a young Austrian who was a failed artist: Adolf Hitler, aged twenty-three.
Soso and Adolf shared one of the sights of Vienna: Hitler’s best friend Kubizek recalls, “We often saw the old Emperor when he rode in his carriage from Schonbrunn to the Hofburg.” But both future dictators were unmoved, even disdainful: Stalin never mentioned it and “Adolf did not make much ado of it for he wasn’t interested in the Emperor, just the state which he represented.”
In Vienna, both Hitler and Stalin were obsessed, in different ways, with race. In this city of antiquated courtiers, Jewish intellectuals and racist rabble-rousers, cafes, beer halls and palaces, only 8.6 percent were actually Jews but their cultural influence, personified by Freud, Mahler, Wittgenstein, Buber and Schnitzler, was much greater. Hitler was formulating the anti-Semitic
The Jews did not fit into either of their visions. They repelled and titillated Hitler but irritated and confounded Stalin, who attacked their “mystical” nature. Too much of a race for Hitler, they were not enough of a nation for Stalin.
But the two nascent dictators shared a Viennese pastime: both liked to walk in the park around Franz-Josef’s Schonbrunn Palace, close to where Stalin stayed. Even when they became allies in the 1939 Molotov—Ribbentrop Pact, they never met. Those walks were probably the closest they ever came.
“Those few weeks that Comrade Stalin spent with us were devoted entirely to the national question,” says the Troyanovskys’ nanny, Olga Veiland. “He involved everyone around him. Some analysed Otto Bauer, others Karl Kautsky.” Despite intermittent study, Stalin could not read German, so the nanny helped—as did another young Bolshevik whom he met now for the first time: Nikolai Bukharin, an intellectual pixie with sparkling eyes and a goatee beard. “Bukharin came to our apartment every day,” says Olga Veiland, “as Stalin lived there too.” While Stalin flirted hopefully with the nanny, she preferred the witty, puckish Bukharin. Besides, it was her job to clean Stalin’s shirts and underwear, which, she complained after his death, was something of a challenge.
Stalin and Bukharin got on well. Stalin would write to him from exile, the start of an alliance that culminated in a political partnership in the late 1920s. But Soso came, suffocatingly, to adore and, fatally, to envy Bukharin. The friendship that began in Vienna ended in the 1930s with a bullet in Bukharin’s head.
“I was sitting at the table beside the samovar in the apartment of Skobelev… in the ancient capital of the Habsburgs,” reports Trotsky, also living in Vienna, “when suddenly the door opened with a knock and an unknown man entered. He was short… thin… his greyish-brown skin covered in pockmarks… I saw nothing in his eyes that resembled friendliness.” It was Stalin, who “stopped at the samovar and made himself a cup of tea. Then as silently as he had come, he left, leaving a very depressing but unusual impression on me. Or perhaps later events cast a shadow over our first meeting.”
Stalin already despised Trotsky, whom he had called a “noisy phoney champion with fake muscles.” He never changed his view. Trotsky, for his part, was chilled by Stalin’s yellow eyes: they “glinted with malice.”
Stalin’s stay with Troyanovsky was a revelation—it was his first and last experience ofcivilized European living, as he himself admitted. He lived in the room that overlooked the street and “worked there for entire days.” At dusk, he would stroll around Schonbrunn Park with the Troyanovskys. At dinner, he sometimes talked about his past, reminiscing about Lado Ketskhoveli and how he was shot in prison. He was characteristically morose. “Hello, my friend,” he wrote to Malinovsky, now back in Petersburg. “So far I’m living in Vienna and writing some rubbish. See you soon.” But he improved. “Shy and solitary at first,” says Olga Veiland, “he became more relaxed and fun.” He did not feel uneasy with Troyanovsky’s genteel style. On the contrary, he remained fond of him throughout his life.
Little Galina Troyanovskaya was a spirited child who got on well with Stalin. “She loved being in adult company,” and Stalin played with her, promising to bring her “mountains of green chocolate from the Caucasus.” He “used to laugh very loudly” when she did not believe him. But she often teased him back: “You’re always talking about the nations!” she groused. Stalin bought the child sweets in Schonbrunn Park. Once he made a bet with her mother that if they both called to Galina, she would go to Stalin for the sweets. They tested his theory: Galina ran to Soso, confirming his cynical view of human nature.[139]
Stalin now asked Malinovsky to return the first draft of his article so he could revise it, adding, “Tell me 1. How is
Lenin awaited him in Cracow; betrayal lurked in Petersburg.{213}
32. The Secret Policeman’s Ball: Betrayal in Drag
