Simon Montefiore - Stalin

Stalin liked his cheerful brother-in-law but doubted his competence as a Chekist, removing him from the Ukraine. Anna, a loving mother to their two sons, was a good-natured but imprudent woman who, her own children admit, talked too much. Stalin called her “a chatterbox.” 2

A third couple made up this sextet of loving relatives. Alexander “Alyosha” Svanidze, also just back from abroad, was the brother of Stalin’s first wife, Kato, who died in 1907. “Handsome, blond, with blue eyes and an aquiline nose,” he was a Georgian dandy, speaking French and German, who had helped rule Georgia in the 1920s and now held high rank in the State Bank. Stalin loved him—“they were like brothers,” wrote Mikoyan. His wife, Maria, was a Jewish Georgian soprano “with a tiny upturned nose, peaches and cream complexion and big blue eyes,” who was the prima donna in the full-time opera of her own life. [58] They saddled their son with the absurd Bolshevik name Johnreed in honour of the author of Ten Days That Shook the World . Svetlana said this glossy couple were brash, always bearing presents from abroad. That avid diarist, Maria, like all the ladies of Stalin’s court, seemed somewhat in love with their Vozhd . There was constant, bitchy competition for his favour among these ladies who were so busy feeling superior to, and undermining, the others that they often missed dangerous signs of Stalin’s seething moods. 3

Meanwhile, Yakov, now twenty-seven, was qualifying as an electrical engineer though Stalin had wanted him to be a soldier. Yasha “resembled his father in voice and looks” but irritated him. Sometimes Stalin managed to show brisk affection: he sent him one of his books, The Conquest of Nature, inscribing it: “Yasha read this book at once. J. Stalin.” 4

As Svetlana grew up into a freckly redhead, Stalin said she precisely resembled his mother, always the highest praise from him—but really, she was like him: intelligent, stubborn and determined. “I was his pet,” says Svetlana. “After mother’s death, he tried to be closer. He was very affectionate—he just wanted to see how I was doing. I do appreciate now that he was a very loving father…” Maria Svanidze recorded how Svetlana buzzed around her father: “He kissed her, admired her, fed her from his plate, selecting the best slices for her.” Svetlana, at seven, often declared: “Providing daddy loves me, I don’t care if the whole world hates me! If daddy told me, ‘fly to the moon,’ I’d do it!” Yet she found his affection stifling—“always that tobacco smell, puffing clouds of smoke with moustache and he was hugging and kissing me.” Svetlana was really raised by her beloved nanny, the sturdy Alexandra Bychkova, and the stalwart housekeeper, Carolina Til. 5

A month after Nadya’s death, Artyom remembers that she was still asking when her mother would be back from abroad. Svetlana was terrified of the dark, which she believed was connected to death. She admitted that she could not love Vasily who was either bullying her, spoiling her fun, or telling her disturbing sexual details that she believed damaged her view of sex.

Vasily, now twelve, was the most damaged: “he suffered a terrible shock,” wrote Svetlana, “ruining him completely.” He became a truculent, name-dropping, violent lout who swore in front of women, expected to be treated as a princeling and yet was tragically inept and unhappy. He ran riot at Zubalovo. No one told Stalin of his outrageous antics. Yet Artyom says Vasily was really “kind, gentle, sweet, uninterested in material things; he could be a bully, but also defended smaller boys.” But he was terrified of Stalin whom he respected like “Christ for the Christians.” In the absence of his disappointed father, Vasily grew up in the sad, emotionally undernourished realm of rough and sycophantic secret policemen instead of loving but firm nannies. Pauker supervised this Soviet Fauntleroy. The Commandant of Zubalovo, Efimov, reported on him to Vlasik who then informed “the Master.”

Stalin trusted his devoted bodyguard, a brawny, hard-living but uncouth peasant, Nikolai Vlasik, thirty-seven, who had joined the Cheka in 1919 and guarded the Politburo, and then exclusively the Vozhd , since 1927. He became a powerful vizier at Stalin’s side but remained the closest thing to Vasily’s father figure: Vasily introduced his girlfriends to Vlasik for his approval.

When his behaviour at school became impossible, it was Pauker who wrote to Vlasik that his “removal to another school is absolutely necessary.” Vasily craved Stalin’s approval: “Hello father!” he wrote in a typical letter in which he talks in a childish version of Bolshevik jargon. “I’m studying at the new school, it’s very good and I think I’m going to become a good Red Vaska! Father, write to me how you are and how is your holiday. Svetlana is well and studies at school too. Greetings from our working collective. Red Vaska.”

But he also wrote letters to the secret policemen: “Hello Comrade Pauker. I’m fine. I don’t fight with Tom [Artyom]. I catch a lot [of fish] and very well. If you’re not busy, come and see us. Comrade Pauker, I ask you to send me a bottle of ink for my pen.” So Pauker, who was so close to Stalin that he shaved him, sent the ink to the child. When it arrived, Vasily thanked “Comrade Pauker,” claimed he had not reduced another boy to tears, and denounced Vlasik for accusing him of it. Already his life among schoolboys and secret policemen was leading the spoilt child to denounce others, a habit that could prove deadly for his victims in later life. The princely tone is unmistakable: “Comrade Efimov has informed you that I asked you to send me a shotgun but I have not received it. Maybe you forgot so please send it. Vasya.”

Stalin was baffled by Vasily’s insubordination and suggested greater discipline. On 12 September 1933, Carolina Til went on holiday, so Stalin, who was in the south, wrote the following instructions to Efimov at Zubalovo: “Nanny will stay at the Moscow home. Make sure that Vasya doesn’t behave outrageously. Don’t give him free playtime and be strict. If Vasya won’t obey Nanny and is offensive, keep him ‘in blinders,’” wrote Stalin, adding: “Take Vasya away from Anna Sergeevna [Redens, Nadya’s sister]—she spoils him by harmful and dangerous concessions.” While the father was on holiday, he sent his son a letter and some peaches. “Red Vaska” thanked him. Yet all was not well with Vasily. The pistol that had killed Nadya remained around Stalin’s house. Vasily showed it to Artyom and gave him the leather holster as a keepsake. 6

It was only years later that Stalin understood how damaged the children had been by his absence and the care of bodyguards—what he called “the deepest secret in his heart”: “Children growing up without their mother can be raised perfectly by nannies but they can’t replace the mother…” 7

In January 1933, Stalin delivered a swaggering Bolshevik rodomontade to the Plenum: the Five-Year Plan had been a remarkable success. The Party had delivered a tractor industry, electric power, coal, steel and oil production. Cities had been built where none stood before. The Dnieper River dam and power station and the Turk-Sib railway had all been completed (built by Yagoda’s growing slave labour force). Any difficulties were the fault of the enemy opposition. Yet this was Hungry Thirty-Three when millions more starved, hundreds of thousands were deported.

In July 1933, Kirov joined Stalin, Voroshilov, OGPU Deputy Chairman Yagoda and Berman, boss of Gulag, the labour camp system, on the ship Anokhin to celebrate the opening of a gargantuan project of socialist labour: the Baltic–White Sea Canal or, in Bolshevik acronym, the Belomor, [59] Belomor cigarettes now became one of the most popular brands, smoked by Stalin himself when his favourite Herzogovina Flor were not to hand. The Belomor Canal was one of the triumphs that were celebrated by writers and film-makers; Gorky, the novelist who had become a shameful apologist for the worst excesses of Bolshevism, edited a book, The Canal Named for Stalin, that amazingly praised the humanitarian aspects of Belomor. a 227-kilometre canal begun in December 1931 and completed by the Pharaonic slavery of 170,000 prisoners, of whom around 25,000 died in a year and a half. Voroshilov later praised Kirov and Yagoda for their contributions to this crime. 8