Simon Montefiore - Stalin

“That would be terrible,” he said to Mikoyan. Even though Stalin had shown interest in the idea, both knew that he would actually “interpret this as an attempt to worm your way into his family,” as Beria told Sergo.

Svetlana was determined to marry Sergo but the Berias put a firm stop to it. As she obliquely admitted: “I wanted to marry someone when I was a young girl… But his parents would not accept me because of who I am. It was a very painful blow.” 4

Worse was to follow: Martha Peshkova was now “as pretty and plump as a quail” and seemed to exist in a “warm scented cloud of strange attraction”: it was, recalled Gulia Djugashvili, “difficult to have Martha as a friend.” Martha’s boyfriend was Rem Merkulov, the son of the MGB boss. Perhaps, having grown up around Yagoda, she had a taste for Cheka princelings because she now fell in love with Sergo Beria whom she married soon afterwards. The Berias did not have a big wedding: “it was not the style of the time,” says Martha. Beria told Sergo that Stalin would not approve of “your getting connected with that family”—the Gorkys. Sure enough, Stalin invited Sergo to Kuntsevo: “Gorky himself wasn’t bad but what a lot of anti-Soviet people he had around him. Don’t fall under your wife’s influence,” warned Stalin, always suspicious of wives.

“But she’s quite non-political,” answered Sergo.

“I know. But I regard this marriage as a disloyal act on your part… not to me, but to the Soviet State. Was it… forced on you by your father?” He accused Beria of making connections with the “oppositionist intelligentsia.” Instead Sergo blamed Svetlana for introducing him to Martha.

“You never breathed a word of it to Svetlana,” Stalin replied. “She told me herself.” Then he smiled at Sergo: “Don’t take any notice, old people are always peevish… As for Marfochka, I saw her grow up.”

Martha moved into the Berias’ dacha where she got to know, and love, the most infamous man of his time. [243] I am fortunate that Martha Peshkova, Gorky’s granddaughter, Svetlana’s best friend and Beria’s daughter-in-law, helped with her unique memories and introduced me to the Gorky/Beria family including Beria’s granddaughters (see Postscript). As a wedding present, Stalin gave Sergo and Martha a copy of Rustaveli’s The Knight in the Panther Skin , wich he had edited himself with Professor Nutsibidze, including it teasingly: “You’d do better to form bonds with the Georgian intelligentsia!” Beria could not have been kinder to her: “I was very fond of him. He was very cheerful and very funny, always singing the Mexican song, ‘ La Paloma ,’ and telling comical anecdotes of his life” such as how he lost his virginity in Romania, getting entangled in the woman’s voluminous pantaloons. He claimed that as a Herculean baby, he was found crawling in the garden holding a snake in his hands. On Sundays, his only rest day, he and Nina slept late and then played Martha and Sergo at volleyball, each assisted by the bodyguards. When Martha gave Beria his first grandchild, “he couldn’t have been sweeter, spending hours sitting by the cradle just looking at her. In the morning, he’d have the baby brought into his and Nina’s room where he’d sit her between them and just smile at her.” He was so indulgent of the child that “he let her put her whole hands into her birthday cakes.”

Martha was less keen on Nina. Her mother-in-law turned out to be as despotic in the house as her father-in-law was out. Nina was lonely and Martha soon found she was seeing more of her mother-in-law than her husband. She wanted them to set up their own home but Nina told her, “If you mention that again, you’ll find yourself very far from your children.”

Beria, says Martha, was “the cleverest person around Stalin. In a way, I’m sorry for him because it was his fate to be there at that time. In another era, he would have been so different. If he’d been born in America, he would have risen to something like Chairman of General Motors.” She was sure he was never a real Communist: he once amazed her when he was playing with his granddaughter. “This girl,” he said, “will be tutored at home and then she’s going to Oxford University!” No other Politburo member would have said such a thing. 5

Svetlana Stalin rebounded from Sergo into an unsuitable marriage. At Vasily’s apartment in the House on the Embankment, Svetlana met Grisha Morozov, who served in the war in the traffic police. “A friendship developed,” recalls Svetlana, but “I wasn’t in love with him.” However, he was in love with her. Stalin was dubious about Morozov, another Jew: after Kapler, he began to feel these Jews were worming their way into his family. But Svetlana was attracted to their warmth and culture, so Stalin said, “It’s spring… You want to get married. To hell with you. Do what you like.”

“I just wanted to get over the rejection,” explained Svetlana years later, “so we married but under other circumstances, it wasn’t my choice. My first husband was a very good person who always loved me.” There was no ceremony: they just went to the register office where the official looked at her passport and asked: “Does your papa know?”

Marrying into Stalin’s family, Morozov “instantly became rather grand,” says Leonid Redens. They quickly had their first baby—a son named Joseph, of course. Svetlana found herself unprepared for marriage: “I had a son when I was nineteen… My young husband was a student too. We had people to look after the baby. I had three abortions and then a very bad miscarriage.” Meanwhile Stalin refused to meet Morozov.

Svetlana was still in love with Sergo Beria. “She never forgave me for marrying him,” says Martha. Svetlana reminded Sergo that Stalin “was furious” about the marriage. She still visited Nina, her surrogate mother. Once Svetlana suggested that they remove Martha, who could take the elder daughter and then she would move in with Sergo and raise the younger one. “She’s just like her father,” Mikoyan said. “She always gets what she wants!”

However, she could also be very kind. When Yakov’s heroism in German captivity had been proven, his widow Julia was released but found that her seven-year-old daughter, Gulia, hardly knew her. Svetlana agreed to look after Gulia and one day she announced, “Today we’re going to meet Mama.” But the child was afraid of the stranger, so daily, with the most touching sensitivity, Svetlana took her to see her mother until gradually the two bonded. This had to be done surreptitiously because, while Gulia was brought up by nannies, her mother remained outside the family. Finally, Julia wrote to Stalin: “Joseph Vissarionovich, I ask you very much not to refuse my request because it’s hard to see Gulia. We live in the hope of seeing you and talking about things not put in this letter. We would like you to meet Gulia…” Later, thanks to Svetlana, Stalin did meet his first granddaughter. 6

The true victor of the war, Stalin enjoyed the prestige of a world conqueror yet the disparity between his political power and his personal exhaustion made him feel vulnerable.

The Generalissimo and Molotov were satisfied, though never satiated, by their prizes. At a southern dinner, Stalin sent Poskrebyshev to bring the new map. They spread it on the table. Using his pipe as a baton, Stalin reviewed his empire: “Let’s see what we’ve got then: in the north, everything’s all right, Finland greatly wronged us, so we’ve moved the frontier farther from Leningrad. The Baltic States, which were Russian territory from ancient times, are ours again, all the Belorussians are ours now, Ukrainians too, and the Moldavians are back with us. So to the west everything’s okay.” But he turned to the east: “What have we got here? The Kurile Islands are ours and all of Sakhalin… China, Mongolia, all as it should be.” The Dunhill pipe trailed round to the south: “Now this frontier I don’t like at all. The Dardanelles… We also have claims on Turkish territory and on Libya.” This could have been the speech of a Russian Tsar—it was hardly that of a Georgian Bolshevik. Molotov shared this mission: “My task as Foreign Minister was to expand the borders of our Motherland. And it seems Stalin and I coped… quite well. Yes I wouldn’t mind getting Alaska back,” he joked. But Molotov understood that there was no contradiction between Bolshevism and empire-building: “It’s good the Russian Tsars took so much land for us in war. This makes our struggle with capitalism easier.” 1