The day after Nadya returned, she started to clean the apartment, shoving around the chairs so loudly that Stalin, working on some article, stormed out of his room. “What’s happening here?” asked Soso. “What’s all the commotion? Oh it’s you! Now I can see that a real housewife has got down to work!”
“What’s up? Is that a bad thing?” retorted the highly strung teenager.
“Definitely not,” answered an amused Soso. “It’s a good thing! Bring some order, go ahead… Just show the rest of them!”
Nadya the schoolgirl was, observed her sister, Anna, “very vivacious, open, spontaneous and high spirited.” Yet her upbringing in this nomadic and bohemian family, disrupted by constant visitors and by her mother’s promiscuity, had caused her to develop a serious and puritanical streak, a craving for order and security.
“Papa and Mama are muddling along as usual,” Nadya wrote to a friend. She came to despise her mother’s dependence on fleeting sexual affairs. “We children are grown up,” she wrote a little later, “and want to do and think what we please. The fact is she [Olga] has no life of her own and she’s still a healthy young woman. So I’ve had to take over the housework.” Perhaps she regarded her mother as a “Dushenka” like the heroine of Chekhov’s story.
Gradually, in the course of that long, eventful summer, Stalin and Nadya became closer: she already admired him as the family’s Georgian friend and Bolshevik hero. “They spent the whole summer of 1917 shut together in one apartment. Sometimes alone,” says Nadya’s niece, Kira Alliluyeva. “Nadya saw the romantic revolutionary in Josef. And my mother said he was very attractive. Of course Nadya fell in love with him.” He nicknamed her “Tatka;” she called him Soso, or Josef.
Stalin, only child of a driven single mother, must have missed the laughter, playfulness and flirtation of family life. He had enjoyed this in exile, and it was now a decade since his marriage to Kato Svanidze. He had always liked the sort of girl who could cook, tidy and look after him like Kato—and his mother. Indeed, the Svanidzes said that Stalin fell for Nadya because she reminded him of Kato.
“Slowly Stalin fell in love with her,” says Kira Alliluyeva. “A real love match.” Soso could have been her father—his enemies would claim he actually was. The dates do not fit, but Nadya must have known that Soso had probably had an affair with her oversexed mother in the past. Was there competition between mother and daughter for their Georgian lodger?
“Olga always had a soft spot for Stalin,” wrote Nadya’s and Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana. But Olga “disapproved” of Nadya’s relationship, “doing her best to talk her out of it and calling her ‘silly fool.’ She could never accept that alliance.” Was it because she knew Soso’s nature or because she had had an affair with him herself—or both? However, “silly fool” Nadya was already in love with Soso. A few months later, she proudly told a confidante: “I’ve lost so much weight people say I must be in love.”
Stalin later talked about how he chose Nadya over her elder sister: “Anna was somewhat pedantic and tiresomely talkative,” while Nadya was “mature for her age in her thinking” and “stood with both feet on the ground. She understood him better.” He was right about Anna, who was to irritate him for the rest of his life, but he had missed something about Nadya.
The teenager was, in her way, as neurotic, damaged and dark as he, perhaps darker. Nadya’s strictness appealed to Stalin, but it would later clash disastrously with his own bedouin informality and wilful egotism. Worse, her sincere intensity masked the family’s mental instability, a bipolar disorder that would ultimately make her anything but the placid homemaker. “But he got a taste of her difficult character,” says Kira Alliluyeva. “She answered back and even put him in his place.” The defiance of this pretty, devoted schoolgirl with the flashing Gypsy eyes must have then seemed attractive to Stalin. But ultimately theirs would be a fatal and ill-fated combination.
We do not know exactly when they became lovers. They became a public couple ten months later. But the relationship probably started at this time.{242}
The Bolsheviks were on the verge of a surprising recovery: its architect was not Lenin or Stalin, but a right- wing would-be military dictator. Kerensky promoted a new Commander-in-Chief, General Lavr Kornilov, a Siberian Cossack with slanting Tartar eyes, a shaven pate and a winged moustache, who emerged as a potential Russian “man on a white horse” to purge Petrograd of Bolsheviks and restore order. But Kornilov was as vain as Kerensky —he had a special bodyguard of scarlet-clad, sabre-rattling Turkomans—and not as clever: he was said to have “the heart of a lion, the brains of a sheep.” Nonetheless Kornilov seemed the man of the moment, and he started reading books on Napoleon, always a bad sign in men of the moment.
Kerensky tried to regain the momentum, holding an all-party Moscow conference, away from the turbulent capital. “Petrograd,” wrote Stalin in one of his religious metaphors, “is dangerous; they flee from it… like the devil from holy water.” He was right: in Moscow, the General stole Kerensky’s limelight. But the two men agreed that Kornilov should march frontline troops to Petrograd to restore order. Then Kerensky, who also fancied himself as the Russian Bonaparte, suspected the General of planning a coup. There was a dangerous surplus of Napoleons. Kerensky dismissed the General, who decided to march on Petrograd anyway.
The capital waited anxiously. Kerensky, appointing himself Commander-in-Chief, found he was without military support and was forced to rely on the Soviet, which remobilized the Bolshevik Red Guards. The General was arrested, but the Cabinet fell apart. Kerensky thereupon anointed himself the dictator of a five-man Directory. He had survived but, like Mikhail Gorbachev after the August coup of 1991, as a busted flush. Sustained by cocaine and morphia, he reigned, but no longer ruled, from the splendour of Alexander III’s suite in the Winter Palace.
“We have at last a ‘new’ (brand new!) five-man Government,” joked Stalin on 3 September, “chosen by Kerensky, endorsed by Kerensky, responsible to Kerensky.” Bolshevik strength surged in the factories, and among soldiers and Kronstadt sailors. “The army that rose against Kornilov,” wrote Trotsky, “was the army-to-be of the October Revolution.”{243}
Stalin’s short reign as Bolshevik leader revealed the overbearing arrogance that had always been his trademark. The Central Committee brought the Military Organization under firm control. Stalin rudely appropriated their funds and took over their newspaper
Stalin often bumped into his old Menshevik acquaintance David Sagirashvili in the corridors of the Smolny Instituted.[171] When Sagirashvili accused him of propagating anti-Menshevik lies in his
At last, both the Petrograd and Moscow Soviets fell into Lenin’s hands, but the Bolsheviks were still divided on what to do next. It was Lenin, by sheer force of will, who drove them to the October Revolution: sometimes one individual does change the course of history. Yet Kamenev now threatened to reroute history himself—the mild Bolshevik offered a completely different path. On 14 September, he began trying to negotiate a coalition with the Mensheviks and SRs at the Democratic State Conference in the Alexandrinsky Theatre.
The Old Man, hiding in Helsinki, was appalled and frustrated. On 15 September, he sent the Central Committee a letter ordering them to seize power on behalf of the Bolsheviks alone.
“History will not forgive us if we do not assume power now!” wrote Lenin. But Kamenev and Zinoviev feared losing everything. It was April all over again: they were not the only ones who thought Lenin was wildly misguided. “We were aghast!” admitted Bukharin. At the ensuing CC, attended by Trotsky, Kamenev, Sverdlov and Shaumian, up from the Caucasus, Stalin backed Lenin and proposed that the letter be distributed secretly to key Party organizations. The Central Committee refused by a vote of six to four, an extraordinary result just a month before the October Revolution that reveals the popularity of Kamenev’s way. Yet the two ultra-radicals, Stalin and Trotsky, seeing no need for any Menshevik alliance, supported Lenin. At the CC on 21 September, Stalin and Trotsky demanded a boycott of the coming pre-parliament, where Kamenev hoped to continue his coalition-building, but
