Simon Montefiore - Stalin

By the summer, the magnates were exhausted after five years of Herculean labour in driving the triumphant Five-Year Plan, defeating the opposition and most of all, crushing the peasantry. After bearing such strain, they needed to relax if they were not going to crack—but even if the crisis of Hungry Thirty-Three had been weathered due to the massive repression, this was no time to rest. Sergo, who as People’s Commissar for Heavy Industry directed the Five-Year Plan, suffered heart and circulatory complaints—Stalin himself supervised his treatments. 9Kirov was also breaking under the pressure, suffering from “irregular heartbeat… severe irritability and very poor sleep.” The doctors ordered him to rest. 10Kirov’s friend Kuibyshev, Gosplan boss, who had the impossible task of making the planning figures work, was drinking and chasing women: Stalin complained to Molotov, later muttering that he had become “a debauchee.” 11

On 17 August, Stalin and Voroshilov set off in their special train. [60] We are especially well informed on this holiday because not only do we have Stalin’s correspondence with Kaganovich, in charge in Moscow, but the GPU took photographs which they mounted in a special album for Stalin, and Lakoba, the host in Abkhazia, also kept notes: therefore we have both sound and vision. We know from an unpublished note that the Vozhd was already paranoid about his movements, fed up with his sister-in-law Anna Redens and keen for Klim to be more discreet: “Yesterday, around my sister-in-law (a chatter-box) and near the doctors (they gossip), I did not want to say my exact departure. Now I’m informing you that I’ve decided to go tomorrow… It’s not good to talk widely. We’re both tasty tidbits and we should not inform everyone by our openness. So if you agree, we go tomorrow at two. So I’ll order Yusis [Stalin’s Lithuanian bodyguard who shared duties with Vlasik] to immediately inform the chief of the railway station and order him to add one wagon, without information as to who it is for. Until tomorrow at two…” It was to be a most eventful holiday: there was even an assassination attempt. 12

At Krasnaya Polyana, Sochi, Stalin found Lakoba, the Abkhazian chief, waiting on the veranda along with President Kalinin and Poskrebyshev. When Stalin and Lakoba strolled in the gardens, Beria, now effective viceroy of the Caucasus, joined them. Lakoba and Beria, already enemies, had come separately. After breakfast on the veranda, the Vozhd , followed by this swelling entourage, which was soon joined by Yan Rudzutak, a Latvian Old Bolshevik who headed the Control Commission but was increasingly distrusted by Stalin, toured his gardens.

“Stop being idle,” said the green-fingered Stalin. “The wild bushes here need to be weeded.” The grandees and the guards set to work, collecting wood and cutting brambles while Stalin, in his white tunic with baggy white trousers tucked into boots, supervised, puffing on his pipe. Taking a fork, he even did some weeding himself. Beria worked with a rake while one of the leaders from Moscow hacked with an axe. Beria seized the axe and, chopping away to impress Stalin, joked, with rather obvious double entendre : “I’m just demonstrating to the master of the garden, Joseph Vissarionovich, that I can chop down any tree.” No grandee was too big for Beria to fell. He would soon get the chance to wield his little axe.

Stalin sat down on his wicker chair and Beria perched behind him like a medieval courtier with the axe in his belt. Svetlana, who now called Beria “Uncle Lara,” was brought down to join them. When Stalin did some work on his papers, Lakoba listened to music on headphones while Beria called over to Svetlana, sat her on his knee and was photographed in a famous picture with his pince-nez glistening in the sun and his hands on the child, while the Master worked patiently in the background.

Voroshilov and Budyonny, who had also turned up, took Stalin, in the front seat of an open Packard, to inspect their horses bred by the army stud. They went on a cruise and then they went hunting, Stalin cheerfully carrying his rifle over his shoulder, with his hat on the back of his head, as his Chekist guard wiped the sweat off his forehead. After a day’s hunting, they pitched tents for an al fresco picnic and barbecue. Later, Stalin went fishing. The informality of the whole trip is obvious: it was one of the last times he lived like this. 13

Meanwhile Stalin was outraged when, in his absence, Sergo managed to manipulate the Politburo against him. Kaganovich remained in charge as more and more leaders went on their holidays. He wrote to Stalin virtually every day, ending always with the same request: “Please inform us of your opinion.” The magnates were constantly fighting one another for resources: the tougher the struggle for collectivization, the faster the tempo of industrialization, the more accidents and mistakes made in the factories, the greater the struggle within the Politburo for control over their own fiefdoms. “Iron-Arse” Molotov, the Premier, rowed with Ordzhonikidze, the quick-tempered Heavy Industry Commissar, and Kaganovich who fought with Kirov who clashed with Voroshilov and so on. But suddenly, the Politburo united against Stalin’s own wishes. 14

In the summer of 1933, Molotov received a report that a factory in Zaporozhe was producing defective combine harvester parts due to sabotage. Molotov, who agreed with Stalin that since their system was perfect and their ideology scientifically correct, all industrial mistakes must be the result of sabotage by wreckers, ordered Procurator-General Akulov to arrest the guilty. The local leaders appealed to Sergo. When the case came before the Supreme Court, the government was represented by the Deputy Procurator, an ex-Menshevik lawyer, Andrei Vyshinsky, who would be one of Stalin’s most notorious grandees in the coming Terror. But with Stalin on holiday, Sergo passionately defended his industrial officials and persuaded the Politburo, including Molotov and Kaganovich, to condemn Vyshinsky’s summing-up.

On 29 August, Stalin discovered Sergo’s mischief and fired off a telegram of Pharisaical rage: “I consider the position adopted by the Politburo incorrect and dangerous… I find it lamentable that Kaganovich and Molotov were not capable of resisting bureaucratic pressure from the People’s Commissariat of Heavy Industry.” Two days later, Kaganovich, Andreyev, Kuibyshev and Mikoyan officially annulled their resolution.

Stalin brooded about the danger of Sergo’s ability to use his undoubted prestige and force of personality to sway his potentates, letting off steam to Molotov: “I consider Sergo’s actions the behaviour of a hooligan. How can you have let him have his way?” Stalin was flabbergasted that Molotov and Kaganovich could have fallen for it. “What’s the matter? Did Kaganovich pull a fast one?… And he’s not the only one.” He fired off reprimands: “I’ve written to Kaganovich to express to him my astonishment that he found himself, in this case, in the camp of reactionary elements.”

Two weeks later, on 12 September, he was still ranting to Molotov that Sergo was showing anti-Party tendencies in defending “reactionary elements of the Party against the Central Committee.” He punished Molotov by calling him back from his holiday in the Crimea—“neither I nor Voroshilov like the fact that you’re vacationing for six weeks instead of two weeks”—and then felt guilty about it: “I am a little uncomfortable with being the reason for your early return,” he apologized but then showed his continuing anger with Kaganovich and Kuibyshev: “It’s obvious it would be rash to leave the centre’s work to Kaganovich alone (Kuibyshev may start drinking).” 15Molotov miserably returned to Moscow. 16