Simon Montefiore - Stalin

There was a priceless moment when Nina’s parents arrived in Khrushchev’s apartment and marvelled at the running water: “Hey Mother, look at this,” shouted the father. “The water comes out of a pipe.” When the parents saw the impressive, lantern-jawed Timoshenko beside the small fat Khrushchev, they asked if the former was their son-in-law.

Stalin was filmed checking places at Kuntsevo by Vlasik. Hitler too was a punctilious checker of dinner placement. Both men appreciated the importance of personal pride in matters of State.

Polina had an Achilles heel: not only was she Jewish but her brother Karp was a successful businessman in the U.S.A. Indeed, in the mid-thirties, Stalin had even encouraged the U.S. Ambassador Davies to do business in Moscow using Karp, a rare example of his nepotism.

Take the case of Molotov’s fitness instructor, a role that reveals a whole new side of the Foreign Commissar. A few months later, Vlasik, who did nothing without Stalin’s knowledge, wrote to Molotov to inform him that Olga Rostovtseva, the fitness lady, was boasting about her closeness to the family: “We know of cases not only where she talks about her sports instruction… but also about your family and apartments…”

In a story that is criss-crossed with emotional distortions, perhaps the strangest cut of all is that Natalya Poskrebysheva, who was born nine months after her mother’s visit to Stalin, believes she may be Stalin’s daughter not only because of Vlasik’s story but also because she once met the daughter of Mikhail Suslov, the ideological boss for most of Brezhnev’s reign, who said: “Everyone knows your real father is lying in the Mausoleum next to Lenin.” This was when Stalin still rested in the Mausoleum. “Do I look like somebody?” Miss Poskrebysheva asked the author. “Like Svetlana Stalin?” It is ironic that she believes her mother’s murderer, Stalin, was her father because she in fact looks the image of Poskrebyshev.

Her body was buried in a mass grave near Moscow while her brother is in one of the pits at the Donskoi Cemetery along with many others. Dr. Metalikov’s daughter raised a monument to them in the Novodevichy Cemetery.

This is often mentioned in Stalin biographies but never with the testimony of any of the five people present. The following is based on the author’s interview with Maya Kavtaradze, the last of those five still alive whose story has never before been published. Now seventy-six and living in her father’s huge, antique-filled apartment in Tbilisi, she has generously allowed the author to use her father’s unpublished memoirs which are an invaluable source. In 1940, Kavtaradze was appointed to the State Publishing House and then as Deputy Foreign Commissar in charge of the Near East for the whole war. Since the Foreign Commissariat was just next door to the Lubianka, Kavtaradze used to joke: “I crossed the road.” Kavtaradze was Soviet Ambassador to Romania after the war and died in 1971.

For the rest of his career, whenever Nutsibidze was challenged, he would point to his forehead and say, “Stalin kissed me here.” The Rustaveli edition was expensively published and Stalin’s name was never mentioned. Stalin ensured that Nutsibidze was allowed to live for the rest of his life in a large mansion in Tiflis still owned by the family. The author is most grateful to the Professor’s stepson Zakro Megrelishvili for the extracts from his mother’s autobiography.

In the nineties, a monument was raised there that reads: “Here lie buried the remains of the innocent, tortured and executed victims of political repressions. May they never be forgotten.” Antonina Babel did not find out that her husband had been executed until 1954 when he was rehabilitated. She spent many years living in America. Her heart-rending memoirs stand with those of Nadezhda Mandelstam and Anna Larina as classics.

There was one strange mercy: Redens’s widow and children did not share the tragedy of the families of other Enemies though they later suffered too. For the moment, they spent their weekends at Zubalovo with Svetlana and their life carried on as if nothing had happened. Indeed, Anna continued to ring Stalin and berate him about Svetlana’s clothes or Vasily’s drinking. Soon they were even reconciled.

Kozlovsky always sang the same songs at all Kremlin receptions. When he put some other songs into the repertoire, he arrived at the Kremlin to find the same programme as usual. “Comrade Stalin likes this repertoire. He likes to hear the same things as usual.”

Bowing before the imperial status of his leader, Mekhlis was obsessed too with delivering a victory for Stalin on his birthday on 21 December 1939: “I want to celebrate it with full defeat of Finnish White Guards!” When the great day arrived Mekhlis told his family: “I’m saluting you. 60th birthday of JV. Celebrate it in the family!” Back at the Kremlin that night, Stalin celebrated his birthday with his courtiers, partying until 8 a.m.: “An unforgettable night!” Dmitrov recorded in his diary.

A muscular paragon of peasant masculinity, typical of Stalin’s cavalrymen, Timoshenko had been a divisional commander in the Polish War of 1920: he appears as the “captivating Savitsky” in the Red Cavalry stories of Isaac Babel who praises the “beauty of his giant’s body,” the power of his decorated chest “cleaving the hut as a standard cleaves the sky” and his long cavalryman’s legs which were “like girls sheathed to the neck of shining jackboots.” The less poetical Mikoyan simply calls him a “brave peasant.”

No papers of formal charges were ever filed so the kidnapping was illegal even by Bolshevik standards. When Beria was arrested after Stalin’s death, this kidnapping and murder was one of the crimes on the indictment.

In November 1941, the Polish Ambassador Stanislaw Kot quizzed Stalin on the whereabouts of these men. Stalin made a show of setting up a phone call to Beria and changed the subject. In December 1941, he told General Anders they had escaped to Mongolia. As we have seen, these sort of sniggering acts of concern were part of his game with Beria. Mikoyan’s son Stepan wrote graciously that his father’s signature on this order was “the heaviest burden for our family.”

At the Eighteenth Party Conference in February 1941, Stalin divided Beria’s NKVD into two commissariats. Beria retained the NKVD while State Security (NKGB) was hived off under his protégé Merkulov. This was not yet a direct demotion for Beria: he was promoted to Deputy Premier and remained overlord or curator of both Organs.

When Admiral Kuznetsov got to know him on their trip to the Far East, Zhdanov chatted about how much he enjoyed working with the navy. “I’d love to go [on a cruiser]. But it’s not always so easy to get away,” he said, adding with a smile, “I am more a river man than a seaman. A freshwater sailor as they say. But I love ships.” Kuznetsov admired Zhdanov who “did a great deal for the Navy.” But he was less helpful to the other services.

This was far from the only such madness: on other occasions, Stalin commissioned a tank based on a crazy principle that “in being destroyed, it protects.”