Simon Montefiore - Stalin

Sergo and Kuibyshev advised Kirov to compromise with Stalin: Kirov became the Third Secretary but remained temporarily in Leningrad. Since Kirov would have little time for Moscow, Stalin reached out to another newly elected CC member who would become the closest to Stalin of all the leaders: Andrei Zhdanov, boss of Gorky (Nizhny Novgorod), moved to Moscow as the Fourth Secretary.

Kirov staggered back to Leningrad, suffering from flu, congestion in his right lung and palpitations. In March, Sergo wrote to him: “Listen my friend, you must rest. Really and truly, nothing is going to happen there without you there for 10–15 days… Our fellow countryman [their code name for Stalin] considers you a healthy man… nonetheless, you must take a short rest!” Kirov sensed that Stalin would not forgive him for the plot. Yet Stalin was even more suffocatingly friendly, insisting that they constantly meet in Moscow. It was Sergo, not Stalin, with whom Kirov really needed to discuss his apprehensions. “I want awfully to have a chat with you on very many questions but you can’t say everything in a letter so it is better to wait until our meeting.” They certainly discussed politics in private, careful to reveal nothing on paper. 4

There were hints of Kirov’s scepticism about Stalin’s cult: on 15 July 1933, Kirov wrote formally to “Comrade Stalin” (not the usual “Koba”) that portraits of Stalin’s photograph had been printed in Leningrad on rather “thin paper.” Unfortunately they could not do any better. One can imagine Kirov and Sergo mocking Stalin’s vanity. 5In private, [67] Among his possessions in his apartment, preserved in Leningrad, is one of his cigarette boxes emblazoned with an unprepossessing portrait of Stalin with a very long nose. The box is opened by pressing the nose. Kirov imitated Stalin’s accent to his Leningraders. 6

When Kirov visited Stalin in Moscow, they were boon companions but Artyom remembers a competitive edge to their jokes. Once at a family dinner, they made mock toasts: “A toast to Stalin, the great leader of all peoples and all times. I’m a busy man but I’ve probably forgotten some of the other great things you’ve done too!” Kirov, who often “monopolized conversations so as to be the centre of attention,” toasted Stalin, mocking the cult. Kirov could speak to Stalin in a way unthinkable to Beria or Khrushchev.

“A toast to our beloved leader of the Leningrad Party and possibly the Baku proletariat too, yet he promises me he can’t read all the papers—and what else are you beloved leader of ?” replied Stalin. Even the tipsy banter between Stalin and Kirov was pregnant with ill-concealed anger and resentment, yet no one in the family circle noticed that they were anything but the most loving of friends. However, the “vegetarian years,” as the poetess Anna Akhmatova called them, were about to end: “the meat-eating years” were coming. 7

On 30 June, Adolf Hitler, newly elected Chancellor of Germany, slaughtered his enemies within his Nazi Party, in the Night of the Long Knives—an exploit that fascinated Stalin.

“Did you hear what happened in Germany?” he asked Mikoyan. “Some fellow that Hitler! Splendid! That’s a deed of some skill!” Mikoyan was surprised that Stalin admired the German Fascist but the Bolsheviks were hardly strangers to slaughter themselves.

That summer, their own repression seemed to be easing. In May 1934, the Chairman of the OGPU, Menzhinsky, a shadowy scholar who had been permanently ill and spent most of his time in seclusion studying ancient manuscripts in any of the twelve languages of which he was master, died. The press announced that the hated OGPU had perished with him, swallowed by a new People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs—the NKVD. This aroused hopes that the dawning jazz age really did herald a new freedom in Russia—but the new Commissar was Yagoda who had been running the OGPU for some time.

The illusion of this thaw was confirmed when Yagoda came to Stalin and recited a poem by Osip Mandelstam, who, with his friend, the beautiful Leningrad poetess Anna Akhmatova, wrote verses with a searing emotional clarity which still shines through that twilight of humanity like beams of heart-rending honesty. Naturally they found it hard to conform with Soviet mediocrity.

Yagoda paid Mandelstam the back-handed compliment of learning the verse by heart, sixteen lines of poetry that damned and mocked Stalin as a bewhiskered “Kremlin crag-dweller” and “peasant-slayer” whose “fat fingers” were “as oily as maggots.” The poet Demian Bedny had complained to Mandelstam that Stalin left greasy fingermarks on the books he constantly borrowed. His fellow leaders were a “rabble of thin-necked bosses,” a line he wrote after noticing Molotov’s neck sticking out from his collar and the smallness of his head. Stalin was outraged—but understood Mandelstam’s value. Hence that heartless order to Yagoda that sounds as if it concerned a priceless vase: “Preserve but isolate.”

On the night of 16–17 May, Mandelstam was arrested and sentenced to three years’ exile. Meanwhile the poet’s friends rushed to appeal to his patrons among the Bolshevik magnates. His wife Nadezhda and fellow poet Boris Pasternak appealed to Bukharin at Izvestiya , while Akhmatova was received by Yenukidze. Bukharin wrote to Stalin that Mandelstam was a “first class poet… but not quite normal… PS: Boris Pasternak is utterly flabbergasted by Mandelstam’s arrest and nobody else knows anything.” Perhaps most tellingly, he reminded Stalin that “Poets are always right, history is on their side…”

“Who authorized Mandelstam’s arrest?” muttered Stalin. “Disgraceful.” In July, knowing that news of his interest would spread like ripples on a pond before the coming Writers’ Congress, Stalin telephoned Pasternak. His calls to writers already had their ritual. Poskrebyshev called first to warn the recipient that Comrade Stalin wished to speak to him: he must stand by. When the call arrived, Pasternak took it in his communal apartment and told Stalin he could not hear well since there were children yelling in the corridor.

“Mandelstam’s case is being reviewed. Everything will be all right,” Stalin said, before adding, “If I was a poet and my poet-friend found himself in trouble, I would do anything to help him.” Pasternak characteristically tried to define his concept of friendship which Stalin interrupted: “But he’s a genius, isn’t he?”

“But that’s not the point.”

“What is the point then?” Pasternak, who was fascinated by Stalin, said he wanted to come for a talk. “About what?” asked Stalin.

“About life and death,” said Pasternak. The baffled Stalin rang off. However, the most significant conversation took place afterwards, when Pasternak tried to persuade Poskrebyshev to put him through again. Poskrebyshev refused. Pasternak asked if he could repeat what had been said. The answer was a big yes.

Stalin prided himself on understanding brilliance: “He’s doubtless a great talent,” he wrote about another writer. “He’s very capricious but that’s the character of gifted people. Let him write what he wants, and when!”

Pasternak’s whimsy may have saved his life, for, later, when his arrest was proposed, Stalin supposedly replied: “Leave that cloud-dweller in peace.” 1

Stalin’s intervention is famous but there was nothing new about it: as Nicholas I was for Pushkin, so Stalin was for all his writers. Stalin pretended he considered himself just a casual observer: “Comrades who know the arts will help you—I am just a dilettante” 2but he was both gourmet and gourmand. His papers reveal his omnipotent critiques of writers, who wrote to him in droves.