Simon Montefiore - Stalin

On holiday in Sochi, Stalin was still infuriated by the antics of fallen friends and truculent children. The relentlessly convivial Yenukidze was still chattering about politics to his old pal, Sergo. Once a man had fallen, Stalin could not understand how any loyalist could remain friends with him. Stalin confided his distrust of Sergo to Kaganovich (Sergo’s friend): “Strange that Sergo… continues to be friends with” Yenukidze. Stalin ordered that Abel, this “weird fellow,” be moved away from his resort. He fulminated against “the Yenukidze group” as “scum.” The Old Bolsheviks were “ ‘old farts’ in Lenin’s phrase.” Kaganovich moved Abel to Kharkov. 10

Vasily, now fourteen, worried him too: the greater Stalin’s absolutism, the worse Vasily’s delinquency. This mini-Stalin aped his Chekist handlers, denouncing his teachers’ wives: “Father, I’ve already asked the Commandant to remove the teacher’s wife but he refused…” he wrote. The harassed Commandant of Zubalovo reported that while “Svetlana studies well, Vasya does badly—he is lazy.” The schoolmasters called Carolina Til to ask what to do. Vasily played truant or claimed “Comrade Stalin” had ordered him not to work with certain teachers. When the housekeeper found money in his pocket, Vasily would not reveal where he had come by it. On 9 September 1935, Efimov reported chillingly to Stalin that Vasily had written: “Vasya Stalin, born in March 1921, died in 1935.” Suicide was a fact in that family but also in the Bolshevik culture. As Stalin cleansed the Party, his opponents began to commit suicide, which only served to outrage him more: he called it “spitting in the eye of the Party.”

Soon afterwards, Vasily entered an artillery school, along with other leaders’ children including Stepan Mikoyan; his teacher also wrote to Stalin to complain of Vasily’s suicide threats: “I’ve received your letter about Vasily’s tricks,” wrote Stalin to V. V. Martyshin. “I’m answering very late because I’m so busy. Vasily is a spoilt boy of average abilities, savage (a type of Scythian), not always honest, uses blackmail against weak ‘rules,’ is often impudent with the weak… He’s spoilt by different patrons who remind him at every step that he’s ‘Stalin’s son.’ I’m happy to see you’re a good teacher who treats Vasily like other children and demands he obey the school regime… If Vasily has not ruined himself until now, it’s because in our country there are teachers who give no quarter to this capricious son of a baron. My advice is: treat Vasily MORE STRICTLY and don’t be afraid of this child’s false blackmailing threats of ‘suicide.’ I’ll support you…” 11

Svetlana, on holiday with her father, remained the adored favourite “my little sparrow, my great joy” as Stalin wrote so warmly in his letters to her. As one reads Stalin’s letters to Kaganovich (usually about persecuting Yenukidze), one can almost see her sitting near him on the veranda as he writes out his orders in his red pencils, enthroned in his wicker chair at the wicker table with piles of papers wrapped in newspaper which were brought daily by Poskrebyshev. He often mentions her. Kaganovich seemed to have replaced Kirov as Svetlana’s “Party Secretary,” greeting her in his letters to Stalin and adding: “Hail to our Mistress [87] Khozyaika means mistress, the female of Khozyain , boss, master, Stalin’s nickname among the bureaucracy, though it also usually means “housewife.” Svetlana! I await instructions… on postponement by 15/20 days of the school term. One of the Secretaries LM Kaganovich.” Vasily was “Svetlana the Mistress’s colleague.”

Three days later, Stalin informed Kaganovich that “Svetlana the Mistress… demands decisions… in order to check on her Secretaries.”

“Hail Mistress Svetlana!” replied Kaganovich. “We await her impatiently.” When she was back in Moscow, she visited Kaganovich who reported to her father: “Today our Mistress Svetlana inspected our work…” Indeed, Stalin encouraged her interest in politics: “Your little Secretaries received your letter and we discussed its contents to our great satisfaction. Your letter enabled us to find our way in complicated international and domestic political questions. Write to us often.” Soon she was commanding Stalin in her “Daily Order No. 3. I order you to show me what happens in the Central Committee! Strictly confidential. Stalina, the Mistress of the house.” 12

Then Stalin heard from Beria that his mother Keke was getting frailer. On 17 October, he headed across to Tiflis to visit her for only the third time since the Revolution.

Beria had taken over the responsibility for caring for the old lady like a courtier looking after a dowager empress. She had lived for years in comfortable rooms in the servant’s quarters of the palace of the nineteenth-century Tsarist governor, Prince Michael Vorontsov, where she was accompanied by two old ladies. All of them wore the traditional black headdress and long dress of Georgian widows. Beria and his wife Nina called on Keke frequently, recalling her spicy taste for sexual gossip:

“Why don’t you take a lover?” she asked Nina. Stalin was a negligent son but still wrote his dutiful notes: “Dear Mother, please live for 10,000 years. Kisses, Soso.” He apologized, “I know you’re disappointed in me but what can I do? I’m busy and can’t write often.”

Mother sent sweets; Soso, money; but, as the son who had replaced her husband as the man of the family, he always played the hero, revealing his dreams of destiny and courage: “Hello my mama, the children thank you for the sweets. I’m healthy, don’t worry about me… I’ll stand up for my destiny! You need more money? I sent you 500 roubles and photos of me and the children. PS the children bow to you. After Nadya’s death, my private life is very hard but a strong man must always be valiant.” 13

Stalin took special trouble to protect the Egnatashvili brothers, the children of the innkeeper who was the benefactor of his mother. Alexander Egnatashvili, a Chekist officer in Moscow (supposedly Stalin’s food taster, nicknamed “the Rabbit”), kept this old link alive: “My dear spiritual mother,” Egnatashvili wrote in April 1934, “yesterday I visited Soso and we talked a long time… he’s put on weight… In the last four years, I had not seen him so healthy… He was joking a lot. Who says he’s older? No one thinks he’s more than 47!” But she was ailing.

“I know you’re ill,” Stalin wrote to her. “Be strong. I’m sending you my children…” Vasily and Svetlana stayed at Beria’s residences and then visited the old lady in her “tiny room,” filled with portraits of her son. Svetlana remembered how Nina Beria chatted to her in Georgian but the old lady could not speak Russian.

Now Stalin recruited his old brother-in-law Alyosha Svanidze and Lakoba to visit his mother with him while Beria briskly made the arrangements. He did not stay long. If he had looked around the rooms, he would have noticed that not only did she have photographs of Stalin but she also had a portrait of Beria in her bedroom. Beria had his own cult of personality in Georgia but more than that, he must have become like a son to her.

Stalin’s real feelings for his mother were complicated by her taste for beating him and alleged affairs with her employers. There is a clue to this possible saint-whore complex in his library where he underlined a passage in Tolstoy’s Resurrection about how a mother is both kind and wicked. But she also had the tendency of making tactless, if drily witty, comments. She wondered why Stalin fell out with Trotsky: they should have ruled together. Now when Stalin sat smiling beside her, he revealingly asked her: “Why did you beat me so hard?”