Keep well dear Mother and keep your spirits up. A kiss.
Your son Soso
24 March 1934
P.S. The children bow to you. After Nadya’s death, my private life has been very hard, but a strong man must always be valiant.
When he visited her for the last time in 1936, she said she wished he had become a priest. This half-amused Stalin. He sent her medicines and clothes. When she deteriorated, he encouraged her. “Glad your health is good,” he wrote in 1937. “Evidently our clan is strong!” She died soon afterwards amid the Great Terror. Stalin did not attend her funeral, but his wreath read: “Dear and beloved mother. From her son Josef Djugashvili.” She was buried splendidly in the church on Holy Mountain.{258}
Stalin kept in contact with old friends from Gori and Tiflis. Sometimes he wrote them a note or just sent them money out of the blue. If they appealed to him, he liked to help. In 1933, he wrote to Kapanadze:
Hi Peta, as you see… I’m sending you 2,000 roubles. I haven’t got more now. This money is a publishing royalty and we don’t accept many royalties, but your needs are a special occasion for me… Apart from this money, you’ll be given a 3,000-rouble loan. I’ve told Beria about this…
Live long and be happy
During the war, Kapanadze and Glurjidze, both ex-priests, and Tseradze, his wrestling friend, got even luckier. On 9 May 1944, Stalin noticed the cash piling up in his safe (from his salaries as Party Secretary-General, Premier, Supreme Commander-in-Chief, People’s Commissar of Defence and Supreme Soviet deputy). He could not spend the money so he scrawled this note:
To my friend Peter Kapanadze—40,000 roubles;
30,000 roubles to Grisha Glurjidze;
30,000 roubles to Mikhail Tseradze.
The note to Glurjidze read: “Grisha! Accept this small gift from me. Your Soso.” He was indulgent to those who never dabbled in politics but it is unlikely he would have spared Iremashvili and Davrichewy. They opposed him politically.[188]
When Stalin seized Georgia in 1921, Iremashvili attended the funerals of those who fell in battle and found himself standing next to Keke Djugashvili. “Keke, it’s your son who is to blame for this,” said Iremashvili, who knew her well from Gori. “Write to him in Moscow: he’s no longer my friend!” When Stalin visited Tiflis later that year, Iremashvili was arrested, but his sister appealed to Stalin, “who showed benevolent kindness to her: ‘What a pity! It hurts me greatly for him. Hopefully [Iremashvili] will find his way back to me!’” Stalin ordered him to be freed and then invited him over. Iremashvili refused. He was arrested again and found himself under the control of Tsintsadze, Stalin’s gangster, now a senior secret policeman. Stalin had him expelled to Germany, where he flirted with Fascism and wrote his hostile memoirs.
The colourful Davrichewy, Gori police officer’s son and fellow bank robber, escaped to Paris. Under the name “Jean Violan,” he became a famous First World War pilot and served as a French spy. Some accounts claim that he had an affair with the notorious courtesan Mata Hari, executed as a traitor in 1917, but the real story of his sexual espionage is no less dramatic. The French secret service suspected a beautiful young adventuress and aviatrix, Marthe Richard, of being a German spy. They enrolled the flying ace Davrichewy to watch her. She fell in love with “Zozo” Davrichewy and they started an affair so passionate that he threatened to kill himself if she was arrested. He managed to prove her innocence; she joined French intelligence and was despatched to Madrid, where she seduced the septuagenarian German intelligence chief.
In 1936, Stalin contacted Davrichewy and invited him to return. Wisely, Davrichewy stayed in Paris. Just after Stalin’s death, Davrichewy declared in an interview: “I am Stalin’s half brother.” He himself died in 1975 after a life described in an obituary as “astonishing—revolutionary, aviator, spy, author.” His remarkable memoirs were obscurely published in French in 1979.{259}
Kamo remained a Bolshevik hero, despite his macabre behaviour with Fyodor Alliluyev. But this dangerous simpleton was unsuited to peacetime work. He became a Chekist but his cruelty was too deranged even for them. By 1922, he was back in Tiflis employed in the customs service. When Lenin considered a Caucasian holiday, Kamo insisted on accompanying him: Lenin never came. According to Tiflis legend, Kamo drank too much, chattering about Stalin’s role in the Tiflis bank robbery, a sensitive subject.[189] He was bicycling home after starting his memoirs when he was run over by a truck. It was said Stalin had him killed: after all, went the joke, it seemed a bit of a coincidence that the only bicycle in Tiflis should be hit by the only truck.
Kamo was buried in the Pushkin Gardens outside the Tilipuchuri Tavern in Yerevan Square, scene of his notorious exploit. His statue replaced that of Pushkin. Later Stalin ordered the removal of his monument. Kamo was reburied elsewhere.{260}
Egnatashvili, Soso’s protector and possibly father, educated his two surviving sons, Sasha and Vaso, at a private school in Moscow. The family were restaurant entrepreneurs and soon expanded outside Gori. Egnatashvili and his sons established restaurants in Baku, while Vaso qualified from Kharkov University, becoming a history teacher.
Old Egnatashvili died in 1929, “very close to Stalin until his last day.” Sasha Egnatashvili ran five restaurants in Tiflis until about 1929. In the early 1930s, both brothers were arrested. Sasha contacted Yenukidze, who had him released and brought to Moscow, where he was received by Stalin. Vaso was also released immediately. Stalin enrolled Sasha in the NKVD, and appointed him to run a Politburo dacha in the Crimea before promoting him to his own Guards Department. Sasha, the former capitalist restaurateur, was made chief of Stalin’s catering department, known as the Base, a trusted position for a paranoid dictator who used poison on others and feared it himself. Egnatashvili became the dictator’s food-taster, hence his nickname in the NKVD: “the Rabbit.” Within the NKVD, he was quietly known as “Stalin’s relative” or “brother,” even by General Vlasik, who knew the dictator better than anyone. (One of Sasha’s underlings was a cook who had contrived, in an astonishing culinary career hidden in the catering shadows of the NKVD universe, to serve not only Rasputin in his early days but also Lenin and Stalin: this world-historical chef was the grandfather of President Vladimir Putin.)
Vaso, who had been a Socialist-Federalist, not even a Menshevik, was promoted to editor of a Tiflis newspaper, then to Secretary of the Georgian Supreme Soviet, Stalin’s eyes and ears in Georgia.
Sasha the Rabbit lived near Stalin’s Kuntsevo mansion, his main residence, and often attended his dinners. When Vaso visited Moscow, he always stayed with Stalin. They remained close to Keke. Sasha Egnatashvili’s letter to Stalin’s mother on her birthday in 1934 reveals their special relationship: “My dear spiritual mother, Yesterday I visited Soso and we talked a long time… He’s put on weight… Over the last four years, I’ve never seen him so healthy. More handsome than you can imagine. He was joking a lot. Who says he’s older? He’s younger than four years ago—no one thinks he’s more than forty-seven!”
In 1940, Stalin remembered his father’s old cobbling apprentice Dato Gasitashvili, who had been very kind to him as a boy. “Is Dato still alive?” he suddenly asked Sasha. “I haven’t seen him for ages.” Egnatashvili summoned Dato, still a Gori cobbler, to Moscow.
One day Stalin, his chief of personal security, Vlasik, and Beria arrived at the Egnatashvilis’ for a Georgian feast: Stalin was reunited with Dato. When Stalin teased him, the old cobbler fearlessly replied: “Do you think you’re Stalin to me as you are to others? To me you are the same little boy I held in my arms. And if you carry on, I’ll pull down your trousers and spank your bottom until it’s redder than your flag!” Stalin laughed. But, ominously, he noticed Sasha’s wife: the Rabbit had happily but dangerously married an ethnic German ex-wife of a Jewish- Armenian businessman: their daughter lived in America.
“Your wife’s in a bad mood,” Stalin said. “Is she offended with me?”
Sasha explained that, being German, she was afraid for herself and for her daughter in America.
“We’ve an agreement with Germany but it doesn’t mean anything,” Stalin reassured her, according to Sasha’s grandson, Guram Ratishvili. “War is inevitable. America and Britain will be our allies.”
