Simon Montefiore - Stalin

He did not soften towards the peasants. On 28 December, Postyshev sent Stalin a note about placing GPU guards on grain elevators because so much bread was being stolen by starving people. Then he added, “There’ve been strong elements of sabotage of bread supplies in the collective Machine Tractor Stations… Let me send 2–300 kulaks from Dneipropetrovsk to the North by order of the GPU.”

“Right! Pravilno!” agreed Stalin enthusiastically in his blue pencil.

Nadya hung over Stalin until his own death. Whenever he encountered anyone who knew Nadya well, he talked about her. Two years later, when he met Bukharin at the theatre, he missed a whole act, talking about Nadya, how he could not live without her. He often discussed her with Budyonny. [53] Budyonny had lost his first wife in a possible suicide, perhaps when she discovered his relationship with his future second wife, the singer Olga. Ironically the other Soviet leader whose wife had committed suicide was the brilliant commander most hated by Stalin—Mikhail Tukhachevsky. The family met every 8th of November to remember her but he hated these anniversaries, remaining in the south—yet he always kept photographs of her, larger and larger ones, round his houses. He claimed he gave up dancing when Nadya died.

Thousands of letters of condolence poured into Stalin’s apparat so the few he chose to keep are interesting: “She was fragile as a flower,” read one. Perhaps he preserved it because it finished about him: “Remember, we need you so take care of yourself.” Then he kept a poem sent to him, dedicated to her, that again appealed to his vision of self:

When students wanted to name their institute after her, he did not agree but simply sent the request to Nadya’s sister, Anna: “After reading this note, leave it on my desk!” The pain of the subject was still fresh sixteen years later when a sculptor wrote to say that he wanted to give Stalin a bust of Nadya. Stalin wrote laconically to Poskrebyshev, his chef de cabinet: “ Tell him that you received the letter and you’re returning it. Stalin.”

There was no time for mourning. The Party was at war.

At 4 p.m. on 12 November, the day after the funeral, Stalin arrived at his office to meet Kaganovich, Voroshilov, Molotov and Sergo. Alongside them was Stalin’s closest friend, Sergei Mironovich Kirov, First Secretary of Leningrad and Politburo member. “After Nadya’s tragic death,” Maria Svanidze noticed that “Kirov was the closest person who managed to approach Joseph intimately and simply, to give him that missing warmth and cosiness.” Stalin turned to Kirov who, he said, “cared for me like a child.” 7

Always singing operatic arias loudly, brimming with good cheer and boyish enthusiasm, Kirov was one of those uncomplicated men who win friends easily. Small, handsome with deep-set brown, slightly Tartar eyes, pock-marked, brown-haired and high-cheekboned, women and men seemed to like him equally. Married without children, he was said to be a womanizer with a special eye on the ballerinas of the Mariinsky Ballet which he controlled in Leningrad. [54] It was therefore entirely appropriate that the Mariinsky should be renamed the Kirov after his death. Certainly he followed ballet and opera closely, listening to it in his own apartment by a special link. A workaholic like his comrades, Kirov liked the outdoors, camping and hunting, with his boon companion Sergo. Like Andreyev, Kirov was an avid mountaineer, an appropriate hobby for a Bolshevik. He was at ease in his own skin. It was perhaps this that made him so attractive to Stalin whose friendships resembled crushes—and, like crushes, they could turn swiftly into bitter envy. Now he wanted to be with Kirov all the time: Kirov was in and out of his office five times during the days after Nadya’s funeral.

Born Sergei Kostrikov in 1886, the son of a feckless clerk who left him an orphan, in Urzhum, five hundred miles north-east of Moscow, Kirov was sent by charity to the Kazan Industrial School where he excelled. But the 1905 Revolution interfered with his plans for university, and he joined the Social Democrat Party, becoming a professional revolutionary. In between exiles, he married the daughter of a Jewish watchmaker but like all good Bolsheviks, his personal life “was subordinated to the revolutionary cause,” according to his wife. During the doldrums before the war, Kirov had worked as a journalist in the bourgeois press, which was strictly banned by the Party, and this was a black mark on his Bolshevik pedigree. Nineteen seventeen found him setting up power in the Terek in the North Caucasus. During the Civil War, Kirov was one of the swashbuckling commissars in the North Caucasus beside Sergo and Mikoyan. In Astrakhan he enforced Bolshevik power in March 1919 with liberal blood-letting: over four thousand were killed. When a bourgeois was caught hiding his own furniture, Kirov ordered him shot. He and Sergo, whose lives and deaths were parallel, engineered the seizure of Georgia in 1921, remaining in Baku afterwards, both brutal Bolsheviks of the Civil War generation.

He had probably met Stalin in 1917 but got to know his patron on holiday in 1925: “Dear Koba, I’m in Kislovodsk… I’m getting better. In a week, I’ll come to you… Greetings to everyone. Say hello to Nadya,” he wrote. Kirov was a family favourite. Stalin inscribed a copy of his book On Lenin and Leninism : “To SM Kirov, my friend and beloved brother.” In 1926, Stalin removed Zinoviev from his Leningrad power base and promoted Kirov to take over Peter the Great’s capital, now the second largest Party in the State. He joined the Politburo in 1930. 8

When Kirov asked if he could fly south to join him for the 1931 holidays, Stalin replied: “I have no right and would not advise anyone to authorize flights. I most humbly request you to come by train.” Artyom, often on these holidays, recalls, “Stalin was so fond of Kirov, he’d personally meet Kirov’s train in Sochi.” Stalin always had “a lovely time with Kirov,” even swimming and visiting the banya . Sometimes when Kirov swam, “Stalin went to the beach and sat waiting for Kirov,” says Artyom.

After Nadya’s death, Stalin’s friendship with “my Kirich” became more insistent. Stalin often called him in Leningrad at any time of the night: the vertushka phone can still be seen by Kirov’s bed in his apartment. When he came to Moscow, Kirov preferred to stay with Sergo, who was so fond of his boon companion that his widow remembered how he once faked a car crash to ensure that Kirov missed his train. [55] Faked car crashes, often with fatal effects, were to become a bizarre feature of Stalin’s rule. Yet Stalin and Kirov were “like a pair of equal brothers, teasing one another, telling dirty stories, laughing,” says Artyom. “Big friends, brothers and they needed one another.” 9

This did not mean that Stalin completely trusted Kirov. In the autumn of 1929, Stalin orchestrated Pravda’s criticism of Kirov. 10However fond he was of Kirov, Stalin could also be cross with him. In June 1928, one of his articles seemed to have been edited when it appeared in Leningradskaya Pravda , provoking a letter that revealed Stalin’s thin-skinned paranoia on even small matters: “I understand… the technical reasons… Yet I’ve heard no other such examples of articles by Politburo members… It seems strange that the 40–50 words cut are the brightest about how the peasantry are a capitalist class… I await your explanation.” 11