Simon Montefiore - Stalin

He effectively ruled Russia for months on end from his new house at New Athos in the late forties—this was his favourite (top) . He also returned to a house where he had enjoyed a happy holiday with Nadya after Vasily’s birth in 1921—the Likani Palace, which once belonged to Tsar Nicholas II’s brother Grand Duke Michael (middle) . When Khrushchev and Mikoyan visited, they had to share a room. He spent weeks in this remote house at Lake Ritsa (bottom) . Stalin was now so frail that his guards built these green metal boxes ( inset ) containing special phones so that he could call for help if he was taken ill on his daily strolls.

All his life, Stalin slept on the big divans that were placed in virtually every room of all his houses. This is the sofa at Kuntsevo on which he died on 5 March 1953.

Plotting the destruction of Molotov and Mikoyan, the aging but determined Stalin watches Malenkov give the chief report at his last public appearance at the Nineteenth Congress in 1952. While organising the anti-Semitic Doctors’ Plot, he ordered his secret police to torture the doctors: “Beat, beat and beat again!” he shouted. But he still found time to play with his grandchildren…

The fight for power began over Stalin’s deathbed. On the right Khrushchev and Bulganin ( alongside Kaganovich and Mikoyan ) face Beria and Malenkov ( alongside Molotov and Voroshilov ) across Stalin’s body. Beria seemed to have won the struggle for succession, but he fatally underestimated Khrushchev.

Stalin at the 1927 Congress: unshaven, pockmarked, sardonic, sarcastic and utterly vigilant, the supreme politician, the messianic egotist, fanatical Marxist, and superlative mass murderer, in his prime.

Simon Sebag Montefiore is a historian specializing in Russia. Born in 1965, he read History at Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge University. His book Potemkin: Catherine the Great’s Imperial Partner was short-listed for the Samuel Johnson, Duff Cooper and Marsh Biography Prizes in Britain. Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar was awarded the History Book of the Year Prize at the 2004 British Book Awards and is being published in over twenty languages. Author of two novels and presenter of television documentaries, he is married with two children and lives in London.

Potemkin: Catherine the Great’s Imperial Partner

FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, SEPTEMBER 2005

Copyright © 2003 by Simon Sebag Montefiore

Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:

Montefiore, Simon Sebag [date]

Stalin: the court of the red tsar / by Simon Sebag Montefiore.

p. cm.

1. Stalin, Joseph, 1879–1953. 2. Heads of state—Soviet Union—Biography. 3. Soviet Union—History—1925–1953. I. Title.

DK268.S8M573 2004

947.085’2’092—dc22

2003027390

www.vintagebooks.com

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eISBN: 978-0-307-42793-9

v3.0

The Soviet secret police was first called the Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counterrevolution and Sabotage, known as the Cheka. In 1922, it became the State Political Administration (GPU) then the United GPU: OGPU. In 1934, it was subsumed into the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD). However, secret policemen were still known as “Chekists” and the secret police itself as “the Organs.” In 1941 and 1943, State Security was separated into its own Commissariat, the NKGB. In 1954, it became a Committee of State Security, the KGB.

She certainly cared for Stalin like a good baba : “Stalin has to have a chicken diet,” she wrote to President Kalinin in 1921. “We’ve only been allocated 15 chickens… Please raise the quota since it’s only halfway through the month and we’ve only got 5 left…”

The Poteshny Palace, where the Stalins lived, means “Amusement Palace” since it once housed actors and a theatre maintained by the Tsars.

One of the few attractive traditions of Bolshevism was the adoption of the children of fallen heroes and ordinary orphans. Stalin adopted Artyom when the child’s father, a famous revolutionary, was killed in 1921 and his mother was ill. Similarly, Mikoyan adopted the sons of Sergei Shaumian, the hero of Baku; Voroshilov adopted the son of Mikhail Frunze, the War Commissar who died suspiciously in 1925. Later, both Kaganovich and Yezhov, harsh men indeed, adopted orphans.

She became director of a gramophone factory from which she was sacked many years later for taking bribes. She lived until 1998 but never spoke about her short friendship with Stalin.

Another of his sweethearts was a young Party activist, Tatiana Slavotinskaya. The warmth of his love letters from exile increased in proportion to his material needs: “Dearest darling Tatiana Alexandrovna,” he wrote in December 1913, “I received your parcel but you really didn’t need to buy new undergarments… I don’t know how to repay you, my darling sweetheart!”

This was not lost on another peasant boy who was born only a few hundred miles from Gori: Saddam Hussein. A Kurdish leader, Mahmoud Osman, who negotiated with him, observed that Saddam’s study and bedroom were filled with books on Stalin. Today, Stalin’s birthplace, the hut in Gori, is embraced magnificently by a white-pillared marble temple built by Lavrenti Beria and remains the centrepiece of Stalin Boulevard, close to the Stalin Museum.

I am grateful to Gela Charkviani for sharing with me the unpublished but fascinating manuscript of the memoirs of his father, Candide Charkviani, First Secretary of the Georgian Party, 1938–1951. In old age, Stalin spent hours telling Charkviani about his childhood. Charkviani writes that he tried to find Beso’s grave in the Tiflis cemetery but could not. He found photographs meant to show Beso and asked Stalin to identify him, but Stalin stated that these did not show his father. It is therefore unlikely that the usual photograph said to show Beso is correct. On Stalin’s paternity, the Egnatashvili family emphatically deny that the innkeeper was Stalin’s father.

The son Konstantin Kuzakov enjoyed few privileges except that it is said that during the Purges, when he came under suspicion, he appealed to his real father who wrote “Not to be touched” on his file—but that may be simply because he was the son of a woman who was kind to Stalin in exile. In 1995, after a successful career as a television executive, Kuzakov, in an article headed “Son of Stalin,” announced: “I was still a child when I learned I was Stalin’s son.” There was almost certainly another child from a later exile.