Yury Zhdanov, CC (Central Committee) Science Department chief, married Svetlana Stalin
GENERALS
Grigory Kulik, Marshal, Artillery chief, womaniser and bungler, veteran of Tsaritsyn
Boris Shaposhnikov, Marshal, Chief of Staff, Stalin’s favourite staff officer
Semyon Timoshenko, Marshal, victor of Finland, Defence Commissar, veteran of Tsaritsyn; his daughter married Vasily Stalin
Alexander Vasilevsky, Marshal, Chief of Staff, priest’s son
Georgi Zhukov, Marshal, Deputy Commander-in-Chief, Stalin’s best general
ENEMIES AND FORMER ALLIES
Nikolai Bukharin, “darling of the Party,” “Bukharchik,” theorist, Politburo member, Stalin’s co-ruler 1925–29, friend of Nadya, Rightist, chief defendant in last show trial
Lev Kamenev, Leftist Politburo member, defeated Trotsky with Stalin, with whom ruled 1924–25, Jewish. Defendant in first show trial
Alexei Rykov, “Rykvodka.” Rightist Politburo member, Premier and co-ruler with Stalin and Bukharin 1925–28. Defendant in last show trial
Leon Trotsky, genius of the Revolution, Jewish, War Commissar and creator of Red Army, “operetta commander” in Stalin’s words
Grigory Zinoviev, Leftist Politburo member, Leningrad boss, Jewish. Triumvirate with Stalin and Kamenev 1924–25. Defendant in first show trial
“ENGINEERS OF THE HUMAN SOUL”
Anna Akhmatova, poet; “harlot-nun,” said Zhdanov
Isaac Babel, author of Red Cavalry and friend of Eisenstein, Mandelstam
Demian Bedny, “the proletarian poet,” boon companion of Stalin
Mikhail Bulgakov, novelist and playwright, Stalin saw his Days of the Turbins fifteen times
Ilya Ehrenburg, Jewish writer and European literary figure
Sergei Eisenstein, Russia’s greatest film director
Maxim Gorky, Russia’s most famous novelist, close to Stalin
Ivan Kozlovsky, Stalin’s court tenor
Osip Mandelstam, poet; “Isolate but preserve,” said Stalin
Boris Pasternak, poet; “cloud dweller,” said Stalin
Mikhail Sholokhov, novelist of Cossacks and collectivization
Konstantin Simonov, poet and editor, friend of Vasily Stalin, favourite of Stalin
Prologue
THE HOLIDAY DINNER
8 November 1932
At around 7 p.m. on 8 November 1932, Nadya Alliluyeva Stalin, aged thirty-one, the oval-faced and brown-eyed wife of the Bolshevik General Secretary, was dressing for the raucous annual party to celebrate the fifteenth anniversary of the Revolution. Puritanical, earnest but fragile, Nadya prided herself on her “Bolshevik modesty,” wearing the dullest and most shapeless dresses, draped in plain shawls, with square-necked blouses and no makeup. But tonight, she was making a special effort. In the Stalins’ gloomy apartment in the two-storey seventeenth-century Poteshny Palace, she twirled for her sister, Anna, in a long, unusually fashionable black dress with red roses embroidered around it, imported from Berlin. For once, she had indulged in a “stylish hairdo” instead of her usual severe bun. She playfully placed a scarlet tea rose in her black hair.
The party, attended by all the Bolshevik magnates, such as Premier Molotov and his slim, clever and flirtatious wife, Polina, Nadya’s best friend, was held annually by the Defence Commissar, Voroshilov: he lived in the long, thin Horse Guards building just five steps across a little lane from the Poteshny. In the tiny, intimate world of the Bolshevik élite, those simple, cheerful soirées usually ended with the potentates and their women dancing Cossack jigs and singing Georgian laments. But that night, the party did not end as usual.
Simultaneously, a few hundred yards to the east, closer to Lenin’s Mausoleum and Red Square, in his office on the second floor of the triangular eighteenth-century Yellow Palace, Joseph Stalin, the General Secretary of the Bolshevik Party and the Vozhd—the leader—of the Soviet Union, now fifty-three, twenty-two years Nadya’s senior, and the father of her two children, was meeting his favoured secret policeman. Genrikh Yagoda, Deputy Chairman of the GPU,[1] a ferret-faced Jewish jeweller’s son from Nizhny Novgorod with a “Hitlerish moustache” and a taste for orchids, German pornography and literary friendships, informed Stalin of new plots against him in the Party and more turbulence in the countryside.
Stalin, assisted by Molotov, forty-two, and his economics chief, Valerian Kuibyshev, forty-five, who looked like a mad poet, with wild hair, an enthusiasm for drink, women and, appropriately, writing poetry, ordered the arrest of those who opposed them. The stress of those months was stifling as Stalin feared losing the Ukraine itself which, in parts, had descended into a dystopia of starvation and disorder. When Yagoda left at 7:05 p.m., the others stayed talking about their war to “break the back” of the peasantry, whatever the cost to the millions starving in history’s greatest man-made famine. They were determined to use the grain to finance their gargantuan push to make Russia a modern industrial power. But that night, the tragedy would be closer to home: Stalin was to face a personal crisis that was the most wounding and mysterious of his career. He would replay it over and over again for the rest of his days.
At 8:05 p.m., Stalin, accompanied by the others, ambled down the steps towards the party, through the snowy alleyways and squares of that red-walled medieval fortress, dressed in his Party tunic, baggy old trousers, soft leather boots, old army greatcoat and his wolf shapka with earmuffs. His left arm was slightly shorter than the other but much less noticeable than it became in old age—and he was usually smoking a cigarette or puffing on his pipe. The head and the thick, low hair, still black but with specks of the first grey, radiated the graceful strength of the mountain men of the Caucasus; his almost Oriental, feline eyes were “honey-coloured” but flashed a lupine yellow in anger. Children found his moustache prickly and his smell of tobacco acrid, but as Molotov and his female admirers recalled, Stalin was still attractive to women with whom he flirted shyly and clumsily.1
This small, sturdy figure, five feet, six inches tall, who walked ponderously yet briskly with a rough pigeon-toed gait (which was studiously aped by Bolshoi actors when they were playing Tsars), chatting softly to Molotov in his heavy Georgian accent, was only protected by one or two guards. The magnates strolled around Moscow with hardly any security. Even the suspicious Stalin, who was already hated in the countryside, walked home from his Old Square office with just one bodyguard. Molotov and Stalin were walking home one night in a snowstorm “with no bodyguards” through the Manege Square when they were approached by a beggar. Stalin gave him ten roubles and the disappointed tramp shouted: “You damned bourgeois!”
“Who can understand our people?” mused Stalin. Despite assassinations of Soviet officials (including an attempt on Lenin in 1918), things were remarkably relaxed until the June 1927 assassination of the Soviet Ambassador to Poland, when there was a slight tightening of security. In 1930, the Politburo passed a decree “to ban Comrade Stalin from walking around town on foot.” Yet he continued his strolling for a few more years. This was a golden age which, in just a few hours, was to end in death, if not murder.2
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