Simon Montefiore: Stalin

The switch between the two secret police chiefs was seamless: on the twenty-fourth, Dmitrov, the Comintern leader, was still discussing arrests with Yezhov at his dacha, but by nighttime on the twenty-fifth, he was working on the same cases with Beria at his house.

Anna Larina spent twenty years in the camps. Her son Yury was eleven months old when she was arrested in 1937 and she did not see him again until 1956, just one of many heart-breaking stories.

The other three generals who signed the letter were, apparently, Stalin’s Tsaritsyn crony, Grigory Kulik, and Commanders Meretskov and D. Pavlov. Commissar Savchenko also signed. Savchenko was executed in October 1941; the fates of the others are told later in this book. All suffered grievously at Stalin’s hands. Only Meretskov out-lived him.

His old lover of 1913, “my darling” Tatiana Slavotinskaya, is an example: Stalin had protected her well into the thirties, promoting her in the Central Committee apparatus, but now the protection stopped abruptly. Her family was repressed and she was expelled from the House on the Embankment. Slavotinskaya was the grandmother of Yury Trifonov, author of the novel House on the Embankment .

She remained a presence in the household until after the end of the war when she married an NKVD general and returned to Georgia where she had children. Her daughter still lives in Georgia.

President Vladimir Putin’s grandfather was a chef at one of Stalin’s houses and revealed nothing to his grandson: “My grandfather kept pretty quiet about his past life.” As a boy, he recalled bringing food to Rasputin. He then cooked for Lenin. He was clearly Russia’s most world-historical chef since he served Lenin, Stalin and the Mad Monk.

Stalin’s bodyguards, whose inconsistent but revealing memoirs were collected long after his death, were not sure about the Valechka relationship. When she became older, she married and, during Stalin’s later years, she complained of her husband’s jealous reproaches. After Stalin’s death, Valechka never spoke of their relationship but when she was asked if the opera singer Davydova ever visited Kuntsevo, her answer perhaps displayed a proprietorial sting: “I never saw her at the dacha… She’d have been thrown out!” Valechka was not a Party member.

Vyshinsky reported that the arrest of hundreds of teenagers in Novosibirsk had been faked by the NKVD: “the children were innocent and have been released but three senior officials including the head of the NKVD and the town Procurator were guilty of ‘betraying revolutionary loyalty’ and expelled from the Party.” What should be done with them? On 2 January 1939, Stalin scribbled: “It’s necessary to have a public trial of the guilty.”

In the ugly wooden chamber that had been created by vandalizing the sumptuous Alexandrovsky Hall in the Great Kremlin Palace.

This blackmail against Malenkov, accusing him of noble connections, may have formed part of the basis of his alliance with Beria though Stalin knew of the evidence. “Think yourself lucky these documents are in my hands,” Beria told him. When Beria was arrested in June 1953, after Stalin’s death, these papers were given to Malenkov who destroyed them.

On 5 February 1939, that shrewd observer of power, Svetlana Stalin, aged thirteen, listed the survivors of the Terror in a note: “1. To Stalin. 2. Voroshilov. 3. Zhdanov. 4. Molotov. 5. Kaganovich. 6. Khrushchev. Daily Order No. 8. I’m travelling to Zubalovo… leaving you on your own. Hold on to your bellies with an iron hand! Setanka, Mistress of the house.” The grandees each replied revealingly: “I obey. Stalin, the poor peasant. L. Kaganovich. The obedient Voroshilov. The diligent escapee Ukrainian N. Khrushchev. V. Molotov.”

This sort of courage counted for something with Stalin. Litvinov, who was three years older than Stalin, could never curb his tongue. That cosmopolitan curmudgeon complained to his friends of Stalin’s “narrow-mindedness, smugness, ambitions and rigidity” while he called Molotov “a halfwit,” Beria “a careerist” and Malenkov “shortsighted.” Molotov said that Litvinov remained “among the living only by chance” yet Stalin always just preserved him, despite Molotov’s hatred for the much more impressive diplomat, because he was so respected in the West that he might be useful again. There was a story that Litvinov had saved Stalin from being beaten up by dockers in London in 1907: “I haven’t forgotten that time in London,” Stalin used to say.

They planned to do the same to Litvinov but his English wife, Ivy, was terrified of imminent arrest and when she confided this to some American friends, the letter ended up on Stalin’s desk. He phoned Papasha: “You’ve an extremely courageous and outspoken wife. You should tell her to calm herself. She’s not threatened.”

The first three Soviet Premiers were Russians. On Lenin’s death, Rykov succeeded him as PredSovnarkom even though Kamenev, a Jew, usually chaired the meetings. In 1930, Rykov was succeeded by Molotov. But Stalin refused the Premiership as much for political as for racial reasons.

The comedy of these negotiations was neatly encapsulated in the question of the Order of the Bath. Drax had arrived without the relevant credentials, a mistake that told Stalin all he needed to know about Western commitment. At the very moment the credentials finally arrived, they had become utterly irrelevant. When Sir Reginald proudly read out his official titles and arrived at this noble order, the Soviet interpreter declaimed: “Order of the Bathtub.” Marshal Voroshilov, displaying both his overwhelming characteristics—childlike naïvety and heroic bungling capacity—interrupted to ask: “Bathtub?” “In the reign of our early kings,” Drax droned, “our knights used to travel round Europe on horseback, slaying dragons and rescuing maidens in distress. They would return home travel-stained and grimy and report… to the King [who] would sometimes offer a knight a luxury… A bath in the royal bathroom.” The Western democracies could not deliver the “price” of a Soviet alliance, namely to back up the Polish guarantee and deliver the Baltic States into Stalin’s sphere of influence. Perhaps they were right since this would still not guarantee stopping Hitler, while there seemed little point in saving Poland from the Huns to deliver her to the Tatars.

Khrushchev’s memoirs have left a confusing impression about the Politburo and the Pact. Molotov, Premier and Foreign Minister, was the front man in this diplomatic game and Stalin was clearly the engine behind it. It is usually stated that the Politburo, including Voroshilov, knew nothing about the negotiations until Ribbentrop’s arrival was imminent but Politburo papers had always been confined to the Five or the “Seven”—and not distributed to regional leaders such as the Ukrainian First Secretary. The messages between Stalin and Hitler were

Across Europe at the Berghof, Hitler had heard the news at dinner, calling for silence and announcing it to his guests whom he then led out onto the balcony, whence they watched with awe as the northern lights illuminated the sky and the Unterberg mountains in an unnatural bath of blood-red light, dyeing the faces of the spectators incarnadine. “Looks like a great deal of blood,” said Hitler to an adjutant. “This time we won’t bring it off without violence.”