Simon Montefiore - Stalin

Others were not so proud. In 1934, Lakoba published a sycophantic history of Stalin’s heroic role in Batumi. Not to be outdone, Beria mobilized an array of historians to falsify his On the History of the Bolshevik Organizations in the Transcaucasus which was published later in the year under his own name.

“To my dear, adored master,” Beria inscribed his book, “to the Great Stalin!” 19

Now Nadya’s death caught up with Yenukidze: a terrorist cell was “uncovered” by Yezhov in the Kremlin, which Abel ran. Kaganovich raged, Shakespearean style, “There was something rotten there.” The NKVD arrested 110 of Yenukidze’s employees, librarians and maids, for terrorism. Stalinist plots always featured a wicked beauty: sure enough, there was a “Countess,” said to have poisoned book pages to kill Stalin. Two were sentenced to death and the rest from five to ten years in the camps. Like everything that happened around Stalin, this “Kremlin Case” had various angles: it was partly aimed at Yenukidze, partly at clearing the Kremlin of possibly disloyal elements, but it was also somehow connected to Nadya. A maid, whose appeal to President Kalinin is in the archives, was arrested for gossiping with her friends about Nadya’s suicide. Stalin had surely not forgotten that Yenukidze had “swayed” Nadya politically, and been the first to see the body.

Yenukidze was sacked, made to publish a “Correction of Errors,” demoted to run a Caucasian sanatorium and viciously attacked by Yezhov (and Beria) at a Plenum. Blackberry first raised the stakes: Zinoviev and Kamenev were not just morally responsible for Kirov’s murder—they planned it. Then he turned to poor “Uncle Abel” whom he accused of political blindness and criminal complacency in letting the “counter-revolutionary Zinoviev-Kamenev and Trotskyite terrorists” feather their nests inside the Kremlin while plotting to kill Stalin. “This nearly cost Comrade Stalin his life,” he alleged. Yenukidze was “the most typical representative of the corrupt and self-complacent Communists, playing the ‘liberal’ gentleman at the expense of the Party and State.” Yenukidze defended himself by blaming Yagoda: “No one was hired for work without security clearance!”

“Not true!” retorted Yagoda.

“Yes it is!… I—more than anyone else—can find a host of blunders. These may be indignantly characterized—as treason and duplicity.”

“Just the same,” intervened Beria, attacking Yenukidze for his generous habit of helping fallen comrades, “why did you give out loans and assistance?”

“Just a minute…” answered Yenukidze, citing an old friend who had been in the opposition, “I knew his present and past better than Beria.”

“We knew his present situation as well as you do.”

“I didn’t help him personally.”

“He’s an active Trotskyite,” retorted Beria.

“Deported by the Soviet authorities,” intervened Stalin himself.

“You acted wrongly,” Mikoyan added.

Yenukidze admitted giving another oppositionist some money because his wife appealed to him.

“So what if she starves to death,” said Sergo, “so what if she croaks, what does it have to do with you?”

“What are you? Some kind of child?” Voroshilov called out. The attacks on Yenukidze’s lax security were also attacks on Yagoda: “I admit my guilt,” he confessed, “in that I did not… seize Yenukidze by the throat…”

On the question of how to punish Yenukidze, there was disagreement: “I must admit,” Kaganovich said, “that not everyone found his bearings in this matter… but Comrade Stalin at once smelled a rat…” The rat was finally expelled from the Central Committee and the Party (temporarily). 20

Days afterwards, at Kuntsevo, a grumpy Stalin suddenly smiled at Maria Svanidze: “Are you pleased Abel’s been punished?” Maria was delighted at his overdue cleansing of the suppurating wound of depravity. On May Day, Zhenya and the Svanidzes joined Stalin and Kaganovich for kebabs, onions and sauce but the Vozhd was tense until the women started bickering. Then they toasted Nadya: “She crippled me,” reflected Stalin. “After condemning Yasha for shooting himself, how could Nadya kill herself ?” 21 [84] Ignoring the fall of Uncle Abel, Svetlana decided she wanted to go to the dacha at Lipki, which had been Nadya’s choice for a holiday home, all decorated in her style. Stalin agreed, even though “it was hard for Joseph to be there,” wrote Maria. The whole wider family, along with Mikoyan, set off in a convoy of cars. Stalin was very warm towards Mikoyan. Svetlana asked if she could stay up for dinner and Stalin let her. Vasily too was often at dinner with the adults.

A mid the Yenukidze Case, Stalin, Kaganovich and Sergo attended the birthday party of Svetlana’s beloved nanny at his apartment. “Joseph has bought a hat and wool stockings” for the nanny. He cheerfully and lovingly fed Svetlana from his own plate. Everyone was filled with excitement and optimism because the great Moscow underground, named the Kaganovich Metro, a magnificent Soviet showpiece with marble halls like palaces, had just opened. Its creator Kaganovich had brought ten tickets for Svetlana, her aunts and the bodyguards to ride the Metro. Suddenly Stalin, encouraged by Zhenya and Maria, decided he would go too.

This change of plan provoked a “commotion” among Stalin’s courtiers which is hilariously described in Maria’s diary. They became so nervous at this unplanned excursion that even the Premier was telephoned; almost half the ruling Politburo was involved within minutes. All were already sitting in their limousines when Molotov scurried across the courtyard to inform Stalin that “such a trip might be dangerous without preparation.” Kaganovich, “the most worried of all, went pale” and suggested they go at midnight when the Metro was closed but Stalin insisted. Three limousines of magnates, ladies, children and guards sped out of the Kremlin to the station, dismounted and descended into Kaganovich’s tunnels. Once they arrived on the platform, there was no train. One can only imagine Kaganovich’s frantic efforts to find one fast. The public noticed Stalin and shouted compliments. Stalin became impatient. When a train finally arrived, the party climbed aboard to cheers.

They got out at Okhotny Ryad to inspect the station. Stalin was mobbed by his fans and Maria almost crushed against a pillar but the NKVD finally caught up with them. Vasily was frightened, Maria noticed, but Stalin was jovial. There was then a thoroughly Russian mix-up as Stalin decided to go home, changed his mind and got out at the Arbat where there was another near-riot before they all got back to the Kremlin. Vasily was so upset by the whole experience that he cried on his bed and had to be given valerian drops. 1

The trip marked another decline in relations between the leaders and the Svanidze and Alliluyev ladies, those un-Bolshevik actresses, all “powder and lipstick” in Maria’s words. Kaganovich was furious with the women for persuading Stalin to travel on the Metro without any warning: he hissed at them that he would have arranged the trip if only they had given him some notice. Only Sergo would have shaken his head at this ludicrous scene. Dora Khazan, working her way up the Light Industry Commissariat, thought they were “trivial women who did nothing, frivolous time wasters.” The family began to feel that “we were just poor relations,” said Kira Alliluyeva. “That’s how they made us feel. Even Poskrebyshev looked down on us as if we were in the way.” As for Beria, the family, with fatal misjudgement, made no bones of their dislike of him. The women interfered and gossiped in a way that Nadya never had. But in the stern Bolshevik world, and especially given Stalin’s views of family, they went too far. Maria, who had sneaked to Stalin about Yenukidze’s amours, boasted to her diary, “They even say I’m stronger than the Politburo because I can overturn its decrees.”